"Travelling? What are you... a teddy boy?"
Sweet, amusing, infatuating, bitter, playful, steady, unsteady, tragic, logical. Just like the process of growing up. I enjoyed this movie very much. And believe me, it has nothing to do with the fact that I love almost anything British. Really. Or that I'm a 60's junkie (killer soundtrack). Anyhow, it is a perfect way to pass the evening - but be prepared for some minor cliché's. No, not in the way you think.
Now, taking a closer look it occurred to me that maybe aesthetics wasn't the only reason they chose to place this movie in that time. The 50's and the swinging 60's was a time of prosperity, as every era after a war. This was the time that the first actual teen movement was created, the teddy boys. Robert J. Cross writes in his paper "The Teddy Boy as Scapegoat":
David (Peter Sarsgaard) is such type of person. He wants the life of a bourgeois and he is not reluctant to use any means necessary to acquire it. Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is of course seduced by his charms. Even after she learns details about the origins of his income she puts aside every ethical issue in order to follow him in his festive life. Why she takes it so lightly is a whole different matter. I guess the creators were not concerned with morals as much as with decisions on what is important in one's life. And Jenny has to go through the cliché to find that out.
Now, taking a closer look it occurred to me that maybe aesthetics wasn't the only reason they chose to place this movie in that time. The 50's and the swinging 60's was a time of prosperity, as every era after a war. This was the time that the first actual teen movement was created, the teddy boys. Robert J. Cross writes in his paper "The Teddy Boy as Scapegoat":
What distinguished working-class children from their parents more than ever before was not merely economics, however, but the widening discrepancy in their expectations of life, particularly with regard to leisure. Enjoying the greater egalitarianism that had arrived in the wake of the election of Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1945, these young people had no intention of following their parents into forelock-tugging social subservience. If their parents had known their place, so to speak, then these youngsters refused to recognise a fixed and inferior social station.
David (Peter Sarsgaard) is such type of person. He wants the life of a bourgeois and he is not reluctant to use any means necessary to acquire it. Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is of course seduced by his charms. Even after she learns details about the origins of his income she puts aside every ethical issue in order to follow him in his festive life. Why she takes it so lightly is a whole different matter. I guess the creators were not concerned with morals as much as with decisions on what is important in one's life. And Jenny has to go through the cliché to find that out.
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