Lillian Hellman’s groundbreaking 1934 play The Children’s Hour has been adapted for the big screen twice, both by director William Wyler, but neither film lived up to it. The Hays Code could be criticized for its absurdly quick watering down of 1936’s These Three, and 1961’s The Children Hour could have been more open about the same-sex attraction that led to the devastating gossip tragedy, but it was still unabashedly ginger on the subject. In her handsome and moving second feature, The Education of Jane Cumming, German filmmaker Sophie Heldmann avoids Hellmann’s play entirely to highlight the real-life 19th century events that inspired it, a story defined not only by societal homophobia but also by colonial racism.
The result is arguably the most satisfying screening of this story to date. The classically well-crafted and movingly performed period drama should enjoy a long festival run after its premiere on Berlin’s Panorama program, and has strong distribution prospects both in the general arthouse and LGBT-specific realms. While Claire Dunn and co-writer Flora Nicholson give great, quietly tormented leads as a teacher and lover whose lives are upended by malicious rumors, and Fiona Shaw provides ripe grand dame support as their chief persecutor, the star of the show is Mia Talia, a rising star who will soon be seen in Taika Waititi’s Clara and the Sun. A vengeful teenage crime.
Fifteen-year-old Jane, the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of a working-class Indian woman and an aristocratic Scottish soldier stationed in India, has recently been sent to England following the death of her parents and is left in the care of her arrogant and resentful grandmother, Lady Cumming Gordon (Shaw), in Edinburgh. The year is 1810. Needless to say, these are not hospitable times for upper-class women of color. Her grandmother’s solution was to send Jane to an exclusive girls’ boarding school with her nice white cousins, keeping her out of sight and out of sight.
The school in question is a brand new school, a passion project founded by progressive educators Miss Pirie (Nicholson) and Miss Woods (Dunn), with the aim of providing a well-rounded education to young women who were largely deemed unnecessary by the authorities. (Lady Coming Gordon supports this system; in an unusual comedic twist in the film, Shaw expresses dissatisfaction when he learns that Pirie and Woods teach math but not dance.)
The student body is small – viewers may notice Aftersun star Frankie Corio in the ensemble – but it’s large enough that a bullying and ally mentality quickly takes root against Jane, who is victimized by her dark skin and relatively exotic wardrobe. (Costume designer Peri de Braganza created this collision of worlds with fabrics, draped Jane’s dress, overdyed cotton in deep ochre and burnt brick tones, a stark contrast to the pale misty pastels and stiff silhouettes of the other girls’ wardrobes.) It doesn’t take long for Pirie and Woods, however, to form a bond with Jane, who treats her with kindness and respect and is delighted to learn that she shares a first name with Miss Pirie. They deepened further during the summer holidays, when she was left in the care of her teachers while the other girls went home.
Already lonely and vulnerable, Jane is thus a far cry from the vindictive young troublemaker she inspired in Hellmann’s play. A sensitive child, she is attuned to the quiet but clear flow of non-platonic love between two women she admires and, in her own naive way, wishes to share it. But when Pirie and Woods, alarmed by the girl’s growing attachment, began to distance themselves more professionally from Jane, Jane felt even more hurt and alone by what she perceived to be their rejection.
So Heldman and Nicholson’s clear, intelligent screenplay assigns the characters very different and more nuanced motivations than we’re used to in this iteration of the story. But the emotional aftermath, when a hurt and confused Jane blithely tells her grandmother that the teachers are lovers and then lies that they had sex in front of her, is familiarly devastating, if not more so than in Hellmann’s stilted melodrama. Instead, the film follows the court proceedings as the women try to clear their names. It’s a fascinating arc, but the movie ends sooner than it probably should have, abandoning a lot of troubling information and events for closing title cards.
Yet restraint is the order of the day here, from Kate Reid’s elegantly desaturated cinematography, wise to the seasonal hues of the Scottish sky, to the film’s delicately sensual love scenes, where even the chaste physical contact feels tense and intimate. In some wonderful scenes, possibilities abound just by warming your cold hands. Aside from Shaw’s amusingly arrogant posturing in a few scenes, the acting is well controlled and internalized, as both Dunn and Nicholson visibly move with admiration and resentment of the harshness of society and professional façade. On the other hand, Jane, played by Talia, is also vulnerable and unstable, and behind her calm and steady gaze, she can reveal a wealth of fear and warlike urges.
