The 60s before the 60s; Kazakhstan’s domestic quarrels, historical trauma and lunar steppes. By ALEXANDER BISLEY.

“IT DOESN’T have to be teaching you know. There is the civil service.” So Emma Thompson’s headmistress ripostes when Jenny (Carey Mulligan) objects to boring school leading to boring university leading to a boring job and a boring life. The line was heartily responded to at a Wellington screening! Lone Sherfig’s latest film An Education – audience fave at Sundance 2009 – is a crowdpleaser.

Nick Hornby (About a Boy) adapts journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir about the 60s, before the 60s. Jenny, a cute girl-next-door, is standing in the rain when older man David (Peter Sarsgaard) charms her into accepting a lift. He’s worried the 16-year-old’s cello will get wet. “What are you doing Friday?” “Going to school” “I mean in the evening.”

One things leads to another. “You have no idea how boring everything was before I met you,“Jenny enthuses. David introduces her to swish restaurants and bars, jazz and art auctions and Paris. He also charms her parents. Her headmistress is less impressed. “I suppose you're think I’m a ruined woman?” “You’re not a woman.”

Sarsgaard, the muscular minimalist from Shattered Glass and Jarhead, is as accomplished as ever. Alfred Molina deftly entertains as Jenny’s Dad, fulminating about the cost of raising kids and restaurant procedure. But An Education belongs to the impressive, winsome Mulligan. Her 2009 slate also includes Michael Mann’s Public Enemies and Jim Sheridan’s Brothers.


KAZAKH film Song from the Southern Seas ain’t no Borat, but it does share a fiendish flair for pungent abuse. “I hope your balls fall off you miserable fool,” Masha yells at her husband Ivan during Sacha’s childbirth. “Keep cursing your husband – it does you good,” her neighbours advise. Indeed, the vigorous, Sagdyievish insults continue; most of the first half hour of Song is delivered in raised voices! “That’s no son of mine. He’s dark,” Ivan ripostes, before domestic violence and talk of women being beset with devils ensues.

Cantankerous kulak Gavrilovich – Sopranos Uncle June spiked through DBC Pierre’s Ludmilla’s Broken English – delivers almost every line in a salty shout. “Stop with the German crap and do your job”. “And you go for my balls with a sickle!” “Why do I humble myself before you like a whore?” “What kind of woman are you?” “I’ll show you bitches”.

There’s more to Song though; it takes a background turn for the deeper. Fifteen years later, wild Sacha, a natural horseman and rustler, quits school and heads for the hills. Ivan also voyages. The beautiful, imposing, reflective Kazakh landscape, shot by Giorgi Beridze, comes into its own: lunar steppes, azure lakes, grasslands.

Nobel Laureate Orhun Pamuk got himself into a whole heap of trouble writing about Turkey’s Armenian Genocide. Songs’ director Marat Sarulu bravely probes Russian massacres in Kazhakstan (and the Russian Kazhaks/ Asiatic Kazhaks question). The message is love, not force.

Although sometimes conventionally lost-in-translation, Song is consistently interesting. Song employs the formal innovation of narrative punctuation through elegant puppetry. And the title? The ditty about hypertension and other health ailments is peculiar; the song about cherry orchards appeals; the best one concludes: “Free me from my memories so that I can be a child again.”

Also on the ex-Soviet front: Themis as A Lady of Loose Morals. A scrappy, courageous indictment of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s totalitarian regime and its Stalinist law and order machine. Viktar Dashuk’s documentary employs scandalous footage and wry humour.