The Education of Jane Cumming

A real-life, decade-long court case from the early nineteenth century arose from a student complaint about the lesbianism of two teachers in Scotland. It is the basis for German director Sophie Heldman’s absorbing sophomore feature and her first English-language film, The Education of Jane Cumming. The period drama had its world premiere at Berlin, and screens at the International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg in Germany.

Powerful turns across the board and an elegantly restrained atmosphere of repressed but potent emotion drive this devastating portrait of prejudice and the collateral damage resulting, which ultimately stands as a stark and unsentimental tribute to the heavy psychological toll paid by women in history who paved the way for LGBTQ rights by choosing to fight for justice.

The actual libel case is summed up in a brief written coda at the end of a film that explores what led up to it. It’s a shocking story, which sums up much about both the institutionalised homophobia and colonial racism in Great Britain at the time, so it’s no surprise it has already proved fertile ground for creative reflection. Heldman based her version on a 1983 book by Lillian Faderman on the true events, which in turn considers how the trial inspired Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play The Children’s Hour.

Clare Dunne gives a quietly shattering performance, nervy and finally full of indignant spine, as Jane Pirie, a former governess. Flora Nicholson is just as compelling as Marianne Woods, her softer-edged companion. Together, the women have decided to turn their hands to teaching, and have launched a boarding school for girls in the countryside near Edinburgh, which they hope to expand from their initial ten students. Among their first charges are the three granddaughters of haughty, influential and hypocritical aristocrat Lady Cumming Gordon (Fiona Shaw), whose motivation for enrolling the girls stems from a delicate societal taboo: one of the girls was born out of wedlock, when her now deceased father was stationed in Calcutta, and she wants to deposit this potential source of shame far from the household and out of her hair.

Rising actress Mia Tharia is searing as Jane, born in India then shunned and humiliated by her white peers. Abandoned already many times over, she is now nursing a white-hot anger that pushes her to lash out, proving the truism that hurt people hurt people, and sparking a cascade of unplanned consequences. As more perceived rejection proves too much, and it hits home that her new residence will be just another temporary stop-off point, it sparks a vengeful response. Cue letters to the parents of students advising them to take their children out of the school based on moral panic and accusations of lesbian trysts. The formidable power structures of privilege are revealed that can and do destroy lives — even if there is a chance of eventually coming through the gruelling psychological, reputational and economic damage as winners.

An end title credit notes that the papers of the trial in which the teachers sought to clear their name, were ordered locked away for a century to prevent the “contamination” of the minds of women and girls, underscoring how thoroughly bigotry against lesbianism, treated as a hushed taboo and an aberration, permeated Georgian-era British society.

Heldman’s drama is fairly conventionally though elegantly framed, and builds its suspense in an assured, steady and inevitable manner that grips. It is handsomely shot in sober, winter blues by D.O.P. Kate Reid, with the light of crackling fires illuminating domestic scenes to give a sense of a forbidding, buttoned-up and frequently callous Anglo-Saxon environment in which the respite of a warm hearth, and a sense of belonging, is crucial but not always easy to find.

Director, screenwriter: Sophie Heldman
Cast: Flora Nicholson, Clare Dunne, Mia Tharia, Fiona Shaw, Sadie Shimmin
Producer: Bettina Brokemper
Editor: Isbael Meier
Cinematographer: Kate Reid
Music: Balz Bachman
Sound design: Jacques Kieffer
Production company: Heimatfilm (Germany), Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion (Switzerland), Sylph Productions (UK)
Sales: Global Constellation
Venue: Mannheim-Heidelberg
In English
114 minutes