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NOTES ON A SCANDAL
STARRING Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett and Bill Nighy.
DIRECTED BY Richard Eyre.
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With its much-celebrated cast, Brit-bourgeois setting, tasteful Philip Glass score and origins as a Booker-nominated novel, Notes on a Scandal has all the airs of good breeding. That’s why it’s such a pleasure to discover that it’s got the heart and guts of a trashy melodrama. At times, the tone reaches a pitch of hysteria seldom seen since Bette Davis and Joan Crawford dined on each other’s scenery in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Though viewers are denied the sight of Dame Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett going at it with chains, knives and nunchucks, Notes on a Scandal is floridly vicious enough not to require such images.
And while it’s hard to tell whether screenwriter Patrick Marber and director Richard Eyre realize how far they’ve gone over the top, they’ve made a briskly paced adaptation of Zoe Heller’s 2003 novel. Dench – who does know exactly what she’s up to – plays Barbara Covett, a brittle, spinsterish history teacher whose surname takes on a literal meaning upon the arrival of a new colleague. Willowy art teacher Sheba Hart (Blanchett) elicits a wave of crushes in her new workplace. Barbara is initially slow to approach Sheba, preferring to judge her quarry from afar. "Is she a sphinx or merely stupid?" she wonders in the film’s appropriately overripe voiceover narration.
After they begin to forge a friendship, Barbara is surprised that Sheba’s personal life is not the picture of middle-class perfection she expected. Instead, her new colleague is married to a "crumbling patriarch" (Bill Nighy), with whom she has a teenage daughter and a son with Down syndrome. Far too trusting, Sheba soon takes Barbara into her confidence, creating an unholy alliance that’s complicated by her secret affair with a 15-year-old student. In effect, the vulnerable Sheba is seduced twice over, first by her precociously gifted young paramour Steven and then, with even more destructive results, by Dench’s self-described "battle axe."
The presentation of Barbara’s repressed lust for Sheba gives Notes on a Scandal an edge of gay panic. But Marber and Eyre are careful to point out that it’s Barbara who has a problem with her lesbian urges, not the film itself. The tale also bears an aspect of class warfare, what with the bourgeois goddess Sheba (a former goth, no less!) being brought low by the working-class Steven and Barbara, later ridiculed for believing she’s "Virginia frigging Woolf" while living in a basement flat. But even that’s reading too much into it – with its raging passions, Notes on a Scandal is closer in spirit and execution to an opera than some worthy-minded piece of social realism. And that makes it high camp and great fun. |
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