Educating Rita
Directed by Lewis Gilbert
Educating Rita is indeed a wonderful revelation. And through Rita's (well her real name is Susan, but she takes up the name of Rita in honor to Rita Mae Brown, one of the few authors she had read)urge to find herself, I discover the real purpose of education.
Rita is a 26 year working-class married girl, who works as a hairdresser and refuses to succumb to the family expectations from her...to have a baby. She decides to educate herself through open university and that brings her to Professor Bryan(Michael Caine). The professors, is initially reluctant to teach Rita. However he finds this self-styled student although tarty-looking creature dressed in a short tight skirt and long black stockings, teetering adorably on her high heels and sporting pink streaks in her dyed blond hair is in all honesty a bundle of spunk and intellectual curiosity. And slowly Rita becomes his protegee. The movie scores high when Rita explains why she has decided to educate herself. Her husband is against her ventire and even burns down her books, she finds herself a misfit in the pub songs with her family,and yet Rita strongly clutches onto her decision to educate herself, to read and to learn when she finds her mother lamenting for "some other song" rather than teh one they sing every time. And Rita understands that its only her education which would give her a chnace to learn "another song", to have a different taste of life, to know herself beyond her role as a hairdresser, a wife or a mother.
And Rita in her own limitations and innocence is indeed dedicated. The sodden, alcoholic professor brooding over his lost social life and relationship, finds streaks of ingenuity, honesty and fresh-air in Rita's presence. At times i felt it is almost Pygmallion in the reverse way. Instead of Higgins' culturally upgrading the country belle Eliza Doolittle, here Bryan in his efforts of educating Rita, realizes that what university prescribed course formats does is to erase honesty and genuine expressions from the minds of pupils and rather tecahes them to think in the ways, already jotted down as others' thoughts. Rita's understanding of assonance as getting the rhyme wrong, impresses him. He understands and even admits that Rita has something more valuable that he can give her. And that is her "own thoughts and ideas" to interpret and understand. Hence Ibsen's production values become insignificant to her, since she thinks, stage was anyways a compromise for Ibsen, who wanted to do it on radio. Such fresh ideas, unscathed by the education system makes Rita Bryan's special student.
However Rita is insistent to be like the othet college students. To argue like them borrowing quotes and thoughts from the books, to be cultured and educated and gets impressed by her new room-mate Trish, who is sophisticated and cultured. This pains Bryan incredibly, finding Rita losing herself, losing her originality to become someone else. He reminds her that she had set out to discover herself and now she has completely lost herself to become someone else.
At this point when you are wondering what literature and books are all about, are they to erase off your originality and fill you up with artificial, borrowed, intellectual banality, the movie enfolds one of its most precious moments.
Rita confronts the professor. She tells him, that today, she might flunk in her exams by expressing her own soulful ideas or she might write the answers as per the university standards, she might accompany her friends to Paris or stay back at London, take up a job or have a movie.. whatever it is SHE HAS A CHOICE. And that is what the professor has helped her in having.
The books have opened a new paradigm for her. Through Blake, Shakespeare, Ibsen...She has indeed tasted a different life. She is not compelled to do anything, be a hairdresser and have a family and baby, just because, she doesnot know what else is there to be done.
And having a "choice" is having power, which has now percolated down to a working class girl like Rita.
This liberating feeling is what thrills and enchants you at the end of the movie.
A must watch
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