Everything about An Education, the story of a 16-year-old girl's affair with a 30-year-old man in London in 1962, comes together in a way that gives the movie the feel of an instant classic. There are the sparkling performances by Carey Mulligan as the young and impressionable Jenny and Peter Sarsgaard as the shady hustler David; the precise costuming and set design and lovely cinematography; the urbane script by novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity) and the elegant and invigorating direction by Denmark's Lone Scherfig.

You can almost imagine the makers of An Education, which opened Friday, busting out the champagne and toasting their genius when the movie was finished. But when Hornby and Scherfig traveled to the Sundance Film Festival in January hoping to land a U.S. distributor, they weren't entirely sure how their trip would turn out.

``I'm a terrible judge of my own work,'' Hornby says. ``I just always presume people aren't going to like anything. You lose a sense of perspective while making a movie, and I didn't know how people would respond to the questionable nature of the material.

``And I didn't know how people would respond to Carey, either. We all loved her as a person, so when we watch her on the screen, that's who we see. But we didn't know how that would translate to other people. And if you don't like Carey, you don't like the movie.''

But Hornby need not have worried. An Education ended up wowing Sundance, winning the Audience Award for Best Drama and Best Cinematography for John de Borman. It also snagged a distribution deal with Sony Pictures Classics -- and has since been sold for release around the world.

SHE'S A STAR

And practically everyone who sees An Education falls in love with its British star, the 24-year-old Mulligan, who is quickly becoming the one to beat for next year's Best Actress Oscar (sorry, Meryl).

The movie was born in the pages of Granta magazine in the spring of 2003, when Lynn Barber published a 10-page autobiographical essay about her adolescence titled ``An Education.'' ``The more I thought about it, the more everything about my life as a teenager seemed odd,'' Barber wrote last August in another article pegged to the film's release. ``Why was I, a conventional Twickenham schoolgirl, running round London nightclubs with a conman? Why did my parents let me? Almost to explain it to myself, I wrote down everything I could remember and found that, once I tapped this untouched spring of memory, there was no stopping it.''

Hornby says when that he read Barber's essay, he immediately turned to his wife Amanda Posey, an independent movie producer, and said, `` `I think you should do something with this.' It seemed very rich material. She asked, `I don't suppose you want to write it?' and I said no. But when they came to talk about writers, I found I was getting possessive and asked if I could do it.''

Although he traditionally writes about male characters in his novels, Hornby says he was attracted to An Education because of its classically simple structure, which provided a lot of room for a movie to expand upon.

UNFAMILIAR PLOT

``These were people I had not seen on screen before, particularly that Bohemian underworld Jenny falls in with after she meets David,'' Hornby says. ``The piece was painful, but it was funny as well. I liked what it has to say about one's relationship with stuff, almost in a High Fidelity way, that this girl was very hungry for music and movies and art. I really identified with the suburban kid who is frightened she's going to get cut out of all that stuff.''

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