You only experience first love once; I suppose it's like the chickenpox in that way. Both usually leave scars as well, though the metaphorical ones gouged by a broken heart ultimately do nothing to toughen it up. Because unlike chickenpox, love will usually recur, and the illusory beauty of falling in love for the first time is that you have no idea how painful the end is going to be. But when you're younger you think you know everything. When you're older, all you know is that you don't. Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig's gracefully rendered coming-of-age film "An Education," based on a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber, takes place at that bittersweet junction.

It's 1961, and 16-year-old Jenny (the lovely Carey Mulligan) clearly fancies herself more worldly than her friends. When she's not absorbing French pop music or daydreaming about a trip to Paris, this smart young lady is making plans to matriculate at Oxford, encouraged by her warm, blustery father (the great Alfred Molina). But then Jenny meets David (Peter Sarsgaard), who recognizes her for the sophisticate every girl wishes to be. Twice her age and with a shady source of income, David is soon treating Jenny to fine restaurants and charming her parents into letting her come away for the weekend. Yet if Jenny hasn't been through this before, we have, and we can tell that David has secrets that will devastate. "An Education" observes as Jenny comes by hers the hard way.

Maybe it's just that flawlessly shot Paris interlude, where she's rocking a luscious sheath dress and Golightly-esque updo, but Mulligan brings to mind Audrey Hepburn, albeit a bit more steely and wry. She's a surprisingly commanding presence, especially in those tense scenes where Jenny, drunk on vicarious adulthood, runs around torching her academic bridges, allowing us to mourn innocence lost as we long for her comeuppance. And Sarsgaard is perfectly cast; slightly creepy in that sibilant Malkovich way, his soft-spoken sexual ambiguity making him seem less threatening. Emma Thompson and Olivia Williams pop up in tiny but crucial roles as teachers, but watch for the scene-stealing Rosamund Pike as Helen. Her heavy kohl and bed hair evoking the young Catherine Deneuve, she's the tragic figure in "An Education," a walking cautionary tale who believes literature will make a girl ugly and wonders why Jenny speaks French when she doesn't have to. You can practically hear Helen begging Jenny to save herself.

When we first met Scherfig she was schooling countrymen Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg with the adorably sarcastic romantic comedy "Italian For Beginners," without question the best movie made under the restrictive tenets of Dogme 95. (Vinterberg's "The Celebration" is a close second; discuss.) Working from a subtle script by the gifted novelist Nick Hornby ("High Fidelity," "About A Boy," etc.), Scherfig has crafted a knowing, sympathetic look at the choices faced by many women as to how they're going to come by their security: men or books? What's beyond welcome is how nonjudgmental "An Education" is to its characters, all of whom have much to learn.