REVIEW: Notes on a Scandal

Feb - 15 | By: Josh Nelson | one comment.

Narrating the film’s opening line, Barbara (Judi Dench), an acerbically witted, “battleaxe” high school teacher, acknowledges, “People have always trusted me with their secrets. But who do I trust with mine?” What at first appears as a confession to the audience though, is later revealed as a diary entry, prompted by the arrival of the school’s new art teacher, Sheba (Cate Blanchett).

While Barbara initially regards her younger, and more attractive colleague with biting contempt, Sheba, sensing a connection between them, seeks her out as a confidant and invites Barbara into her “bourgeois bohemian lifestyle”. However, their newfound friendship soon becomes the source of an intense interpersonal struggle when Barbara unwittingly spies Sheba in a compromising position with a 15-year old student.

Notes On A Scandal is intriguing for a number of reasons. Firstly, while the “scandal” of the title suggests the sexual encounters between teacher and underage student, the film avoids any specific attempt to explain Sheba’s paedophilic desire (much like Happiness). Instead, the film draws on the effect of the sexual taboo as an act that both enables and propels both Sheba and Barbara’s desires. For while the film is structured mainly from Barbara’s perspective it soon becomes clear that she is far from a reliable narrator, and she obsessively manipulates Sheba’s guilt and deception as a screen for her own destructive past, a past that seems destined to repeat itself.

While Blanchett has received an Oscar Nomination for her measured performance, it is Judi Dench, who previously collaborated with director Richard Eyre on Iris, who commands the screen. As Barbara, Dench shifts with ease between bouts of cynical wit, palpable grief and desperate loneliness, exacting equal measure of pity and empathy from the audience. Hers is a rare performance indeed, aided unquestionably by Patrick Marber’s taut and at times darkly humorous script. It is a relief that so far, at least in this country, Notes On A Scandal seems to have avoided the predictable ‘moral outrage’ by certain groups that traditionally accompanies films of this nature. And, as a thought provoking treatment of obsession and desire, it’s a rewarding film.