Notes on a Scandel
Rating: 
Director: Richard Eyre
Starring: Dame Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett
Review: Paul Becker
Runtime: 92 min
At the centre of Richard Eyre’s film adaptation of Zoe Heller’s novel Notes on a Scandal is Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), a crusty, aged history teacher at a nondescript London school. Her name is aptonymonic and takes us back to our very first lesson in basic psychology under the tutelage of Hannibal Lecter: “And what do we Covett, Clarice? – We Covett what we see every day…” New to the staff is Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), who teaches art and spontaneously invites Barbara to lunch with her family one day. Their strange relationship will provide the focus throughout.
Sheba, as vulnerable as she is beautiful, doesn’t resist for long when a 15-year-old pupil named Steven starts determinedly to woo her; Barbara finds out and sets out to use her new knowledge to deepen her friendship with Sheba, now able to base it on mutual secret-sharing.
She also provides a running commentary on unfurling events by assiduously committing her thoughts to a notebook. And what thoughts they are: “She had nowhere to turn but to trusty old Bar,” she says of Sheba, sounding very much like Humbert Humbert justifying his unlawful lust for Lolita; “by the time I had taken my seat in the Gods, the opera was in full progress” is her sardonic description of a calamitous fight taking place in the Hart household. Yet, for all her sharpness of observation she compulsively lies to herself, clinging to a very warped view of reality.
We the audience should thank her for that; we are never exposed to the full extent of anguish and loneliness which fuels Barbara’s quest for a soulmate. Her cat dies, and there’s a glimpse of real grief; but it switches to forboding in an instant when Barbara feels insufficiently comforted by Sheba. It is a marvellously controlled performance by Judi Dench: when she is told that the Harts never actually invited her to their summer house in France, she merely gives a crisp “Fine. I won’t come then.” She never lobbies for our sympathy, making her the most appealing sort of anti-heroine.
Cate Blanchett, meanwhile, superbly at ease in the cloak of Englishness, provides the right kind of exoticism to captivate the likes of Barbara and Steven and makes us understand a woman who feels trapped in “bourgeois bohemia”; mother to a disabled son, eager for a change.
Patrick Marber’s script is adequately literary and cutting - a refreshing update on The Bostonians, Henry James’ 19th-century study of repressed lesbianism - but in its capacity as a chamberpiece, it suffers from typical storytelling constraints. The characters are so well drawn and acted that when a sort of jolly-good-cup-of-tea ending is tacked on it feels like a slight to their trials and tribulations, a failure to take them seriously or at least an unwillingness to accompany them on their way.
The film is given momentum by a breezy Philip Glass score and support by a solid Bill Nighy as Sheba’s husband.
