'An Education" should be required study for aspiring filmmakers. The combination of a literate script, an adroit cast and an economical style is simple addition that achieves an alchemical feat: the best film of the year.

Of course, movie magic doesn't happen without pixie dust, and the secret ingredient here is an effervescent young actress named Carey Mulligan. Mulligan is 24, but she fully embodies Jenny, a 16-year-old schoolgirl in a London suburb in 1961.

Jenny is so far ahead of her classmates at an all-girls school that she is coasting to the finish line, polishing her credentials to apply to Oxford but already daydreaming about a sophisticated adult life.

From out of that cloud emerges David (Peter Sarsgaard), a charming 30-ish gent who offers Jenny and her cello a ride home one afternoon. Soon he is whisking her off to London for cocktails and classical music.

Few movies have been so astute about the stages of seduction. When David meets Jenny's status-seeking but protective parents (Cara Seymour and Alfred Molina), he disarms them with flattery and fine wine. Jenny's own resistance is broken down by the breathless whiff of deceit, the tendrils of French perfume and the envy of her classmates.

Yet there's a critical element of the unpredictable here. When the relationship inevitably turns sexual, there's a flicker of infantile neediness in David that later ignites into scandal.

The sparkling script is by Nick Hornby ("High Fidelity"), adapted from a fictionalized memoir by Lynn Barber. It was directed by Lone Sherfig, a Swede whose previous film was "Italian for Beginners." Her selectively focused imagery is simply right, and the period details are intoxicating.

Most intoxicating of all is Mulligan. To watch Jenny test-drive new postures as she plots a course between youthful exuberance and worldly inertia is also to watch a star forming in the firmament of great actresses. In "An Education," Mulligan graduates, with honors.