Education comes in many guises. Here are a few example, which all involve large dollops of self-help (spoilers abound, so caveat lector):

1.
An Education
2009, Lone Scherfig

We'd already seen this director in action in Their Finest, and I'm now even more of a fan.

The movie shows us a bright, ambitious, curious 16-year-old named Jenny, who becomes embroiled in a relationship with a much older man named David.

It's 1961. So maybe the age gap per se did not seem so outrageous. Certainly, Jenny's parents, who until David's arrival have been single-mindedly pushing their daughter to Oxford, do not seem to consider this older man's protection unusual or creepy (they are also innocent enough to believe it is irreproachably platonic). David is smooth, you see, and knows how to exploit the latent snobbery that is never too far below the surface in Britain. He rapidly has them eating out of his hand.

There is nothing in the relationship that is nonconsensual or illegal. And you could definitely argue that Jenny benefits. She gets to go places and do things that are way beyond her parents' sphere of experience, and she loves the glittery, sophisticated world of restaurants and galleries and concerts that is opening up to her.

Yet it's an unquestionably icky business. Even before you learn that David (and his lovable-rogue friends) are into some seriously dodgy dealings, and well before you learn that David actually has a wife, and is a serial offender with regard to collecting young girls as trophies -- even before all that, it's a somewhat uncomfortable watch even while it's funny and intriguing. What is it with this guy, you keep wondering...

The role of women is an important subtheme. Jenny's parents are horrifyingly ready to ditch their educational aspirations for her as soon as David proposes. University, it seems, is just not necessary if you've bagged a rich husband.

Her teacher, on the other hand, is aghast that she's planning to throw away her bright Oxford prospects for the sake of marriage. At the end, when Jenny's decision to quit school has blown up in her face -- she has found out about David's double life, but school rules mean that she has definitively forfeited her place there -- this is the person who tutors her so that she can pass her university exams. The little London flat where the teacher lives her independent life is unpretentious but homely and artistic. It represents an attractive alternative to married dependence.

The school itself seems steeped in archaic ideas about feminine prospects. One of the earliest images features the girls walking around with books on their heads. What?! Deportment still? In 1961? And when the blatantly anti-Semitic headmistress harangues Jenny about her upcoming trip to Paris, she seems more concerned about loss of virginity than loss of educational opportunity.

An Education is, along the way, an interesting little cameo of early 1960s England. Andi Teran deftly contextualizes Jenny's dilemma -- "Her hunger for sophistication and cultural enrichment clashes with the bleakness of that period in Britain's history" -- and quotes Screenwriter Nick Hornby: "I have 16,000 songs on my iPod and not one of them was recorded in Britain before 1961." Hornby felt he understood Jenny's motivation, and empathized with "that sense of being bored in a suburb of London and frightened that somehow the city is going to shut you out of its life".


The gloss fairly rapidly went off the cooler city symbolized by the London Eye...

The film is very closely based on a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber, who comments that the element of the relationship that she was really in love with was not Simon (the name of the real older man), but his friends, Danny and Helen. "I loved them both equally. I loved their beauty... At that time, few people in Britain admired the pre-Raphaelites, but Danny was one of the first, and I eagerly followed... I found it easy to talk to Danny... Helen... drifted around silently, exquisitely, a soulful Burne-Jones damsel half hidden in her cloud of red-gold hair. At first, I was so much in awe of her beauty I could barely speak to her. But gradually I came to realise that her silence was often a cover for not knowing what to say and that actually... she was thick."

Some of the film's funniest moments gently exploit this dynamic. At one point, Jenny makes a comment to Helen in French. "What did you just say?" Helen asks. Jenny repeats what she said, but in English. "No," says Helen, "what you said before didn't sound at all like that." "I was speaking French," explains Jenny. "Why?" asks a bemused Helen.

According to Barber, her time with Simon, genuinely was "an education". She became someone who was not "a complete hick". But ironically, this period also cured her of a desire for sophistication: "By the time I got to Oxford, I wanted nothing more than to meet kind, decent, straightforward boys my own age." And there were negative lessons too. She learned not to trust people, to suspect that anyone is capable of acting out a lie: "Learning all this was a good basis for my subsequent career as an interviewer, but not, I think, for life. It made me too wary, too cautious, too ungiving. I was damaged by my education."



2.
English Vinglish
2012, Gauri Shinde

Shashi is a middle-class woman who lives with her husband, children, and mother-in-law in Pune, India. She works hard to be a homemaker, and runs a little business selling her winning laddoos on the side.

Her problem is that her husband is a jerk, who not only looks down on Shashi because she doesn't speak English that well, but has also encouraged their daughter to join him in his contempt.

When Shashi needs to travel alone to New York, to help out with the arrangements for her niece's wedding, her lack of English again puts her at a disadvantage. After one humiliation too many, she enrols in a class. Her English improves, and the flattering attention of one of her fellow-students, though virtuously rejected, ups her self-esteem.


Learning French, La Rochelle, France, 1990



It's a little larger than life, this movie. Shashi is a little too patient, the husband a little too dastardly, the English teacher a little too zany. But it's amiable, feel-good stuff. None of the students in the English class have things easy, but the message is very much that success comes to those who have the courage to persist. And that's an unimpeachable message.

Back to play the role of Shashi, after 15 years of absence from cinema, is the famous Sridevi ("who had ruled in the 90s and was the highest-paid actor of her time"). She is a luminous presence, it has to be said.


Learning Indonesian, Yogyakarta, 2011

Shashi's character was apparently inspired by the situation of the Gauri Shinde's mother, who successfully ran a pickle business, but struggled -- as do most people in India, we're told -- with English. It is the insensitivity and insecurity surrounding this issue that pushed her to make the film, which definitely resonated in India, with colleges and schools taking students to screenings. According to The Times of India, "Those who speak English fluently usually adopt a condescending attitude towards those who don't." Ah, colonialism, your tentacles just carry on squeezing the life out of everyone...


Learning Indonesian, Surabaya, 2013

3.
Molly's Game
2017, Aaron Sorkin

A totally different kind of education is depicted in this movie, which is based on the real-life story of Molly Bloom. In fact it's a kind of sequel to Bloom's own 2014 memoir: Molly's Game (lengthily subtitled: From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys' Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker).

Scripted as well as directed by Aaron Sorkin, it is characteristically fast-based and verbal. I enjoyed it. The window it offers onto the lifestyle of the moneyed male gamblers who constituted Molly's clientele was certainly an education for me. Wow, do people really live like that...? In darkened rooms, risking obscene sums of money on the turn of a card? I don't envy them, I can honestly say.

But it's Molly's self-education that takes centre-stage.

A skier with every chance of qualifying for the Olympics, she sees her career prospects wiped out during a horrible accident on the slopes. So she has to find something else to do, and doesn't want to go straight off to law school. Molly is extraordinarily intelligent. Offered a way in to the world of high-stakes poker games, she rapidly learns everything that can possibly be known about this strange world, and successfully deploys that knowledge to build herself an empire. Strategy, psychology, finance -- she's on top of it all.

It's very much a man's world, and the movie asks "interesting questions about masculinity, wealth and power, how women can exist within that world, and the concessions they have to make to do so... In those poker games, we see a microcosm of patriarchal society." As the story progresses, Molly becomes alternately the object of condescension, jealousy, courtship, drunken maundering, and outright violence.

The multiple stresses of her position eventually tell, and she becomes addicted to various uppers and downers. Then the FBI decide to investigate her, and she needs a smart lawyer. He is difficult to convince (but Molly quickly wins over his young daughter, who intuitively sees her as a kind of role model). And eventually he's on board too, believing in her, defending her, and admiring her innate sense of honour and loyalty.

Molly's psychologist father looms heavily throughout as the overly demanding trainer who was never satisfied with anything. That's believable enough. But the scene at the end where he rescues her from the ice rink was my least favourite of the whole movie. As this review puts it, it feels "contrived; the redemption it depicts is intended as a much-needed moment of catharsis, but it ends up feeling like smug mansplaining".

Otherwise, interesting.

You can see the real Molly Bloom in action here, explaining the allure of the scene she encountered, and what she's doing now.


The nearest we ever got to the world of this movie... Las Vegas, 2004



4.
Roxane
2019, Melanie Auffret

This is tragi-comedy, a genre that is always difficult to pull off. I wasn't sure at first. But by the end I was on board, both convinced and moved.

It's about French free-range poultry farmer Raymond Leroux, who (along with his fellow producers) is finding it increasingly hard to make ends meet. So when it's time for the next consultation with the cooperative they work with, they decide to push to raise the price of their eggs. I guess we've all been here. We roust ourselves up to make a demand from those with more power, only to find that the worst answer is not necessarily no... The cooperative has decided that the way ahead is to deal exclusively with large operations, meaning Raymond and his colleagues will be frozen out in just a few months' time.

So here is where the education kicks in. Raymond, who left school at 16, is an unusual chicken farmer in that he not only has a passion for the French literary classics (particularly Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac), but also shares that passion with his flock of chickens. Every day, he gathers them round his big tree, and as a reward for their laying efforts, he reads them some stirring lines. Which they -- or (what I presume is) their CGI lookalikes -- apparently very much appreciate.

Don't be misled by the sentiment. Raymond, it is true, has his own companion chicken, Roxane, who accompanies him everywhere. (I have no idea how you train stunt chickens... She was undeniably cute, although you do worry about her safety in the car...) But, Roxane aside, this is still very much a commercial concern. After the hens have had a certain number of months to dutifully produce eggs, enjoy their pretty surroundings, and imbibe the cadences of literature, they go off "on holiday" (as the children are told). Normally, a new load is shipped in, and the cycle starts again. But this time, that's all hanging in the balance.

Inspired by his quirky old aunt to create an internet "buzz" around this chicken problem, Raymond starts to climb the steep learning curve towards making Youtube videos that will engage, inform, and mobilize his audience and potential customers.

And of course he gets the chickens on board. At first his videos are very rough around the edges, and he finds himself the butt of much ridicule. But slowly he learns to make things work better technically. And he taps his one-time enemy, French-literature-loving English neighbour Wendy, for inspiration and drama training. Eventually, as his videos gain ground, he happens upon a great idea: to market eggs which will not only be recognizable (brand "Roxstar"), but whose origin will be traceable by QR code.

Whether this will work or not, of course we don't know.


Fine chickens in Indonesia, 2013



For James Croot, this is "a bittersweet, charming tale which feels like an Ealing comedy-meets-Ken-Loach-lite", and that does kind of sum up the mixed-genre effect. But it's impossible not to be moved by the video Raymond makes after the departure of what he thinks will be the last lot of chickens, or not to be exhilarated by the Big Campaign to publicize the New Idea.

Many years ago I read Marie-Paule Cepre's L'annee de la lune rousse (The Year of the Red Moon), which appeared in 1993. I guess up until then I'd taken a somewhat unsympathetic view of French farmers. This book, a very interesting depiction of small-farm life in France, at least made me open to thinking a bit differently. As I wrote in my diary at the time: "This was for me a new perspective on the European agricultural policy. The struggles and heart-break and labour of a small farm. Very sad, as apparently insoluble. There's something wrong with a society that has f***ed up its food provisioning as badly as we have". I was reminded of all this as I watched Roxane.

At one point, there's a very poignant reading of some verses by Sacha Guitry: "We always remember so badly those who have done us good." Which is a good summary, says Louise Almeras, of the way we treat those who feed us.

The Guitry lines continue:

But maybe one day you will experience
This happiness that ephemeral glory doesn't know,
This happiness that we can't buy
And maybe one day you will be popular!
And that, you see, is almost as good as love!

What an apt foreshadowing of the life of the Youtube star...


Other fowl we encountered regularly near our home in Yogya