Paris, the view from Dominique's.
                                                                                                                                                Photo credit: B. Daly
A friend writes:

 "Just saw "An Education" -- was hooked the minute the camera zoomed in on the schoolgirl in her bedroom lip-synching to Juliette Greco.  Been there.  And yes, I'd have gotten in the burgundy Bristol sports car if Peter Sarsgaardd had offered me a lift.  The film has the ring of truth."

For some of us, at a certain age and growing up in a certain era, Paris represented everything romantic and sophisticated and worth knowing about.  La plus belle ville du monde, as a dear old gentleman (who happens to live there) likes to say.  And so, in our youth and innocence, as we set out on our pilgrimmage for Love, Paris was our final destination.  The Holy City.  On the way there were many side trips of course, as you might imagine, but those are stories for another time. 

I find it no mere coincidence that, as the film progresses and under the growing influence of her new friends, the young heroine of "An Education" (played to perfection by Carey Mulligan) comes to resemble the young Audrey Hepburn as we knew her in "Roman Holiday" (1953) and "Sabrina" (1954) or "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961), "Charade" (1963) and "My Fair Lady" (1964).   Projecting our own dreams and fantasies onto the big screen, how often and how happily did we suspend our disbelief as we watched Miss Hepburn's characters transformed from simple girls to glamorous fashion models or princesses who were always fallen in love with.  Miss Mulligan's transformation is all the more touching, however, for being more real and just shy of entirely convincing, which is to say that we see and feel her eagerness to become the woman she will almost certainly become, in time but not quite yet.  Meanwhile there's the trace of uncertainty, of being slightly ill at ease but so anxious to please, and we are reminded of what these sorts of transformations in the real world are really like.  That every journey growing up has its price, and the final destination is never quite so inevitable as we would like to believe.    

It is said that Miss Mulligan is currently cast in a film production of "Brighton Rock," based on the novel by Graham Greene (1904 - 1991).

You will not be surprised to learn that, for rather obvious reasons, I can hardly wait to see it.