Notes On A Scandal



Well here’s a form of love we luckily don’t encounter everyday - the obsessive kind that leads to sociopathic behaviour.

Although it can be argued that all love is some form of mild craziness, the main characters in this taut melodrama are quite mad. Well, at least one is. The other – semi-mad, maybe.

Dame Judi Dench plays Barbara Covett, predator, a very spooky villain indeed. Some may disagree with the word “villain”, but it is the one I choose.
She is an aging “spinster” (her word) schoolteacher, with one cat, one jaded end-of-career pov, one lonely heart and a new prospect.
Cate Blanchett enters Barbara’s line of sight as Sheba, the prey, an insecure new art teacher at Barbara’s school.
The story begins with Barbara’s voice–over, reading from her own diary. The words are aloofly cutting as she verablly stalks her quarry.
Honestly, Dench is so malevolent in this, the music by Philip Glass so foreboding, the tight focus on Dench’s features and bad hair days so merciless, one half expects her to spring from the shadows in the next frame as a full-blown attack cat or fanged monster. She does manage this, metaphorically, at one point. The woman is uncanny!

The performance is brilliant, of course, in its feral intensity and far too reminiscent of a teacher I remember from childhood – I suppose everyone must have had a teacher like Miss Covett. That too is the brilliance of Judi Dench - making this very particular character very recognizable.

What does Barbara covet? Sheba. Young, lovely, monied, married, a mother, an artist who doesn't "have to" work now becoming an art teacher in a rather tony school. This is not the same British school we’ve often seen – not the inner city wasteland of a To Sir With Love, but a modern progressive school where the Headmaster believes in the Arts and the students are the opposite of unruly – quite ruly, in fact. Except one.
A cheeky 15 year old with a Scottish accent is hot for teacher. And…teacher gives in.

This does not sit well with Barbara, The Battleaxe (again her own description of herself) and frightful emotional blackmail ensues.

Dench and Blanchett are simply superb in their numerous scenes together, one masked and manipulative, the other as emotionally opaque as Vaseline.
When Dench finally blows her cool she shocks us with the depth of her neediness and how her wrath simmers. Again the only comparisons I can make are animal, the pounce after a long slow coil.
When Blanchett finally discovers Dench’s diary and she explodes we finally have a glimpse of the persona who actually would have an affair with a 15 year-old student. Until then she still seems either too Bambi-like, too vague, or still too…nice…to get so down and dirty, to break that kind of rule.

Consequences ensue. After it plays out, we leave the film feeling quite uneasy for a new woman who meets Barbara at her favourite look-out bench.

She's been to this bench often, the way a panther will find high ground to survey the movements in the jungle below.

Based on the novel by Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal brings up up-close and personal with two characters rarely seen in mainstream film. We are the richer for it.

Highly Recommended.