Film Review: Notes on a Scandal

Notes on a Scandal is a film about loneliness. Sheba (Cate Blanchett) is married to Richard (Bill Nighy), her ex-professor and a man many years her senior. They have two children: an angsty teenage girl and a young boy with Down's syndrome. Sheba misses the passion she once shared with her husband and finds refuge in her artist's studio behind the home she married into. Barbara (Judi Dench) is a strict disciplinarian who shares a basement flat with her cat. She longs for companionship and goes about finding it in the most dubious of ways.

Sheba is starting her first day as an idealistic art teacher. The story is told through the eyes of Barbara, a self-proclaimed battle axe history teacher. Barbara, in clever narration, writes in her journal the story of meeting Sheba, writing that she can only share this story with "you." We know she's talking to us and we happily come along with our new friend as she tells us the intimate details of the stormy relationship on the horizon. The story unravels in delectable morsels of narrative diolague delivered with gusto by Dench. Much to her delight, upon helping Sheba control some rowdy students, Barbara snags an invite to Sheba's home for dinner with her family. Barbara immediately takes a disliking to the lot of them. After a meal of lasagna--which Barbara cheekily admits upsets her bowels--the family dances around the living room as Barbara watches uncomfortably, telling us, "They do things differently in bourgeois bohemia." Later, Sheba takes Barbara into her studio where she expels the contents of her entire existence upon Barbara, including her sex life: "It is a peculiar trait of the priveleged," Barbara narrates, "immediate, incautious intamacy." I could go on with these gems Barbara offers to her "journal," but we have a plot to discuss.

Soon Barbara witnesses Sheba in a compromising position with one of her students, Steven, played with a keen sense of maturity and its childish counterpart by Andrew Simpson. Barbara quickly realizes the power she now holds and promises to harbor Sheba's secret as long as she ends the affair because, after all, they're friends. Sheba, intoxicated by the newness of the familiar, is unable and that's when Dench's Barbara comes unhinged. Oh, not Fatal Attraction unhinged. We're talking Judi Dench here. Barbara is a barrel of gun powder at the end of a long and slow-burning fuse.

The performances here are top notch. The screenplay by Patrick Marber is a strong interpretation of British novelist Zoe Heller's story of the same name. The novel and film both allow us access to these lives via the skewed eyes of Barbara. We literally watch Barbara crack from the inside out. As Barbara writes in her journal, it is clear she is not only trying to make herself believe her intentions are good but she wants us to like her as well, and darnit, we do like her in our own lonely and twisted way.

Director Richard Eyre worked with Dench in the wonderful Iris. In Notes, he creates a tension where we can actually hear the crackling of the ground as it breaks beneath the characters. He understands actors and how to play to their strengths. Fortunately, he has a great bunch to work with. Besides Dench and Blanchett, Nighy plays a role we haven't seen him in of late. He's convincing as a man completely in love with his former student.

The film pulls off the colossal feat of convincing us to both detest and respect Barbara. It's tough to like an old broad hellbent on destroying lives and forcing companionship through manipulation and blackmail. But then, we've all known loneliness and its power over us. Most of us would never be brave enough to go that far, but then most of us aren't Judi Dench.