A coach rattles through the Scottish countryside. Lady Cumming Gordon (Fiona Shaw), a woman with a fixed expression, brings three girls to a private school near Edinburgh in the year 1810. Two of them are her granddaughters. The third, Jane (Mia Tharia), is also hers – but she is encountered differently. For she is an illegitimate, and not a white child. Her late father fathered her during his service for the East India Company, with a woman from Calcutta. His last wish: education for the child.
With subtle shifts in tone and small gestures of distance, as they thread through the finely observed historical drama “The Education of Jane Cumming,” one can quickly sense how much Jane’s life so far has been shaped by exclusion. Accordingly, the 15-year-old moves through the new surroundings with considerable caution.
But Jane is lucky, for the school is not a place of dull conventions. It is led by Jane Pirie (Flora Nicholson) and Marianne Woods (Clare Dunne), two women ahead of their time. They teach the older girls mathematics and Greek, not only dance and conversation. Above all, they take their pupils seriously, meeting them with empathy rather than mere strictness.
“The Education of Jane Cumming”:
February 22, 6:45 PM, Cubix 9, Berlin
When, at the grandmother’s behest, they spend the summer with Jane on the coast, they even manage to reach her. In the vastness of the landscape, it becomes increasingly clear that there is a familiarity between the two teachers that goes beyond collegiality. Flora Nicholson and Clare Dunne portray this closeness with fine nuances, hinting at their connection only through slightly too-long glances and barely noticeable pauses in conversation.
Emancipation from Societal Conventions
Until well into the second half of the film one might think “The Education of Jane Cumming” is a delicate coming-of-age drama about the quiet possibility of emancipation from social conventions – were it not for the fact that the film is based on a real defamation case. For Jane will level serious accusations against her two teachers, whom she admires and whose closeness she increasingly seeks.
To her grandmother, she will claim not only that the two teachers are engaging in an intimate relationship, but also that they enacted it in the girls’ dormitory. For the two women, their very existence is now at risk. Parents pull their daughters from the school – until no girl remains.
The case has already been interpreted many times, inspiring the play “The Children’s Hour” (1934) by Lillian Hellman and later the film adaptation “Infamy” (1961) with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. Director Sophie Heldman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Nicholson, stays closer to the historical framework. The trial that the two teachers bring against Jane’s grandmother – whose files were to remain sealed for a century to “not contaminate the thoughts of women and girls” – remains omitted from the film.
The film looks at what no court record can capture
Sophie Heldman chooses to look at what no court record can capture, and imagines not only who these women might have been, but also how personal wounds and social pressure created a conflict that pitted them against one another as adversaries.
All of this is told with notable empathy: “The Education of Jane Cumming” does not judge hastily, but presents a precise drama about how misfortune sometimes runs its course – and it unfolds a lasting impact precisely because of its acute sense for subtleties.
