Notes on a Scandal (2006)

That was an excellent one.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

The acting in this movie is really good.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

This is one of the most gripping drama films I've seen in a long time. Supported by absolute class acting performances by Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, the movie explores the torment and the needs of the two women as each of them become friends and then the plots unravels the dimensions of each of these characters through gradual slips of engagement. The movie goes deep into the portrayal of the immense burden of solitude that the protagonist is surrounded with, as the screenplay functions through a narration of Barbara's diary. The background score gets a bit overbearing at times, but overall it flavours the movie with a sense of brewing emotions and turmoil. I'd say it's a sleek, profound and an intact interpretation of the novel and is a must watch for people who enjoy watching drama. It does seem like a bit dark in it's overall perspective, as the viewer doesn't feel empathetic about the tragic endings of all the characters involved.

Notes On A Scandal shines an unblinking and often bitterly tainted spotlight into what makes people tick, how they interact with one another and what a slap in the face it can be when you see what they really think and feel, independent of how they may carry themselves in public. Judi Dench is acid personified as an older woman and veteran teacher at a local high school, who's ranks have recently been joined by a younger art instructor (Cate Blanchett). Dench is jaded, her only friend being her cat Portia, and has an insidious habit of keep a diary in which she writes down prickly little barbs about everyone and everything around her, often cruel and judgmental in nature. She takes a shine to Blanchett, who is married to a much older and renowned man (the excellent Bill Nighy) and has every vibrant thing in life that Dench is bereft of, left with the vacuum of her own empty existence. She envies, aspires to and resents Blanchett's existence, and pours a malicious cocktail of verbal attacks into her journal, safe in the knowledge that it's just as personal and private as her own thoughts, and that she'll never be found out. Or will she? I've lived long enough to know that secrets you try to hide have a way of working their way to the surface, becoming known and hurting those you love or try to connect to. Speaking of secrets, things get incredibly complicated when Blanchett gets caught up in a torrid affair with a teenage boy she teaches, lured in by lust's song and deaf to consequence, which is something that befalls us all more than we'd care to admit. Dench thinks she can use her knowledge of the affair as leverage to get what she wants, which she may not even be sure of at all, beyond it obsessively involving Blanchett. The two of them are dynamite as two sides of the many faced coin of ambiguity. The human behavior in this film somewhat defies the usual story structure and parameters of character we are used to in film. Decisions are arbitrary, ugliness is exposed, people are contradictory and confused in a way that leaves them stranded without beats to fall back on with their work. High praise is deserved to a piece this honest and willing to explore these places.

In Notes on a Scandal, Judi Dench plays Barbara Covett, a spinster history teacher at a British public school, who narrates the story with tart, dolorous wit. A self-described "battle-axe", she is so ensconced by her own loneliness, so embittered by her inability to achieve intimacy with another human, that she has turned inwardly toxic. It doesn't help matters that she's a deeply closeted lesbian.Barbara's newest obsession is the school's new art teacher Sheba Hart (Blanchett), whose wealth and magnificence are a draught of nectar to her own drab existence. Sheba excites Barbara's silent fascination and derision by wafting sexily about the place with her liberal-patrician attitude, her hippy-dippy idealism, and her remarkable beauty. Barbara, who keeps a copious diary of her thoughts and feelings, becomes increasingly delusional about Sheba, concocting a fantasy life for the two of them, imagining her to finally be "the one". Never mind that Sheba is married with two kids - as far as Barbara is concerned, she'd be better off with Barbara. When she discovers Sheba's sensational love affair with one of her students, it's an opportunity Barbara seizes with relish, as we see her moral outrage turn to narcissistic manipulation as she tries to conceal their secret. Notes on a Scandal is about something deeply unlovely in human nature rarely explored by artists: the explosive combination of desire and social envy. The brilliance of the film's concept is matched by a powerful screenplay that proves to be a screen writing master-class from Patrick Marber who makes the subtleties obvious and sets up the story's twists and turns with unmistakable confidence. Director Richard Eyre, with unshowy authority, instills a mildly suspenseful quality to the movie, while imbuing it with enough restraint, pacing the proceedings with an eye for detail. The restraint successfully allows for several moments in which the characters erupt to be that much more jolting.The movie's driving force however is Dame Judi Dench, who is an absolute powerhouse as the repressed, predatory lesbian. We know fully well that Barbara is a kind of monster, but from the moment she cynically sizes up the year's new crop of students - "Here come the local pubescent proles - the future plumbers and shop assistants, and perhaps there's the odd terrorist, too" - she has us. And in Dench's hands, Barbara never lets us go; the acerbic wit never fails. But her biting remarks are always tempered by the sense of her bitter sadness, which in turn is tempered by her moments of uncanny perception. It's a brilliant role and a brilliant performance - witty, hateful and heartbreaking all at once. But it doesn't exist in a vacuum; Cate Blanchett, is every bit Dench's equal, showing great range in moments that demand release of vulnerability and pent-up passion, delivering a harrowing performance as the unwitting target in a tragically fraught relationship. Together, they are an absolute delight! Bill Nighy as Sheba's cuckolded husband displays great range in a relatively small part.Notes on a Scandal is a quintessential tale of twisted love, of festering secrets and emotional self-harm. Something so horrible and abject shouldn't be so compulsively watchable, and yet it is. Engrossing, bewildering, searing and shattering, this is a film that reverberates on every level.

The world of the staff room and classroom offers great potential for drama, given the way that schools bring the young and the old(er) into close, daily contact in the context of what is - at face value at least - the noble and worthwhile mission of education. Of course, as Dame Judi Dench's jaded teacher character (the aptly-named) Barbara Covett makes clear from almost the very start of the film, the mission gains further edge when it unites in one place the working class kid with the resolutely middle-class teacher, and yet more so when the educational gap is viewed cynically (if sadly perhaps correctly) as unbridgeable. Covett leaves us in no doubt that she is an observer, but also a manipulator, par excellence, and her life of rather unfulfilled professional and emotional ambition has evolved to the point where meticulously-documented long-game attempts to position people (especially women) where she wants them has become her raison d'etre. Into this world, this established institutional scenario, comes that most archetypal of literary heroes, the new teacher - in the (not-unappealing) shape of (the again pithily-named) Sheba Hart, known to we the filmgoers as Cate Blanchett. She is to be the initially-cool and then wildly-buzzing fly increasingly enmeshed in the web patiently and steadily spun by spider Barbara Covett. And this is the fun part for those watching, since Sheba's "whiter-than-white" -ness (in every sense of the term) rapidly gives way to a kind of chaos, as her joy at finding a pupil interested in what she has to teach (coolly but powerfully played by Andrew Simpson) gives way to justifiable-if-risky favouritism and affection, and then perhaps-unavoidable, but clearly-unethical lust. There are a few erotic fireworks at this point that can claim to tip the viewer off moral balance in a small way, just as they have achieved the same effect on the grand scale between the characters involved. And just as Dame Judi's icy control makes for a spellbinding performance, so does Blanchett's "disintegration" and descent into a chaos that impinges on the lives of a number of others, not least a by-no-means innocent but kindly-enough husband (well-enough done by Bill Nighy). Such a story perhaps befits a more tempestuous Latin kind of a setting, but the makers are too clever by half to give us that clichéd way out. No, this is humdrum, lower middle-class, superficially well-organised and sedate London, in which the most spectacular setting we can come up with is a rather damp and cloudy hillside park. And of course this only adds to the contrast between the apparently "everyday" circumstances, and the truly extraordinary, yet very persuasive train-wreck of a story that unfolds and engulfs the two (three?) main characters, and all around them. It's a quite upsetting watch, in some ways, but one is ever-aware that real-life issues are being raised here, about what can and must happen - at least from time to time, when two different worlds collide...