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Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench battle with obsession in Notes on a Scandal |
Director: Richard Eyre
Cast: Judi Dench (Barbara Covett), Cate Blanchett (Sheba
Hart), Bill Nighy (Richard Hart), Andrew Simpson (Steven Connolly), Phil Davis
(Brian Bangs), Michael Maloney (Sandy Pabblem), Joanna Scanlan (Sue Hodge), Tom
Georgeson (Ted Mawson), Shaun Parkes (Bill Rumer), Emma Williams (Linda), Julia
McKenzie (Marjorie), Juno Temple (Polly Hart)
Zoe Heller’s novel Notes
on a Scandal makes superb use of an increasingly unreliable narrator to
reveal the complications in the affair between a female art teacher and a young
male student. It’s a device that doesn’t always carry across as well to film,
but Richard Eyre and screenwriter Patrick Marber have still crafted a fine story
about obsession and envy in all its different ways.
In an inner-city school, bohemian art teacher Sheba Hart
(Cate Blanchett) is a new arrival, struggling to learn how to control her
students. It’s a skill long-since mastered by jaded and bitter history teacher
Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), who soon finds herself fascinated by the
attractive and engaging Sheba. This relationship is complicated when she
discovers that Sheba has begun a sexual relationship with one of her 15-year
old students, Steven Connolly (Andrew Simpson), a student with a difficult
record who has shown a surprising interest in art. As Barbara positions herself
as Sheba’s only trusted confidant, the danger of discovery begins to become
ever more likely as Sheba’s behaviour becomes more and more reckless.
The real strength of Eyre’s film are the two lead
performances from Dench and Blanchett, a match-up surely made in casting
heaven. Dench is superb in one of her best film roles, turning Barbara Covett
into exactly the sort of shrivelled up, bitter spinster you are not surprised
to learn has led a life of loneliness. Dench laces the performance with a sharp
nastiness, masked behind a chilly professionalism, but she also makes clear the
aching loneliness, the desperation and the ability to deceive herself that
Barbara has, the longing to be loved but also the possessive obsession that
drives love away.
She’s equally well-matched by Blanchett, at her most
glamourous and natural as Sheba. One of the film’s strengths is the way it
avoids giving spurious psychological reasons for Sheba’s obsession for this
basically fairly unpleasant young lout. Blanchett identifies this sense of
being trapped in Sheba, this desire to rebel and taste a little bit of freedom
(in every home scene she is shown undertaking most if not all the housework and
childcaring duties), feelings that mutate into a sexual obsession with
Connolly. Blanchett is desperate, self-deceiving and hugely tragic, unable to
fully express the reasons for her feelings herself, but unable to let go of her
addiction to a new wildness and danger in her life that you feel she has never
really felt before.
These two performances power a film that explores obsession
and envy, with Barbara obsessed (to a scarily possessive and manipulative
degree) with Sheba, exploiting Sheba’s own reckless and sexual obsession with
Connolly. These feelings are shown to be often beyond the understanding of
other characters, and both women ret-con events and reactions from the target
of their obsessions to build elaborate fantasy worlds. It’s the danger of
obsession here, the way we shape the facts to meet our desired preconceptions.
It doesn’t matter what reality, or what anyone else, says – you want to believe
what you want to believe.
And it’s these obsessions that lead people both to take unbelievable
risks and also to feel a crushing sense of envy and possession. Both Barbara
and Sheba can barely tolerate the idea of their loves focusing attention
elsewhere, and despite seeming to have so much control in their relationships
are helpless victims. Sheba is reduced to begging tears when it feels like her
relationship with Connolly is burning out. After all is revealed, Barbara’s
efforts to take control of Sheba’s life are revealed to be powered by an almost
desperately sad need to believe that Sheba and she are starting a new life
together. So deep is Barbara’s denial about her own lesbianism (and so extreme
her unhappiness about herself), it’s a romantic vision she is so deep in denial
feels unable to even begin to put any sexual dimension onto.
Envy and human frailty run through the whole film. Most of
the teaching staff, especially Phil Davis’ sadsack maths teacher in love with
Sheba, carry their own small obsessions and envies. Sheba’s husband himself
left his first wife for Sheba when she was one of his students. The students have
more than enough rivalries to deal with.
It’s a deadly circle, with contact breeding obsession,
breeding envy. To get such an effect, Marber’s adaptation needs to streamline
the book. The biggest loss as a result is the book’s slow, creeping,
realisation that Barbara is a deeply arrogant, bitter, unlikeable person who
views most of the people around her with contempt. Here Dench’s waspish
voiceover immediately makes it clear to the viewer that she is not that nice a
person. It’s a shame, as it rather signposts for the viewer where the film may
be heading.
The storyline also races through the book (the film is less
than 90 minutes) which means it often feels more like a melodrama. While I
think it’s a strength that the film doesn’t try and give a real reason for
Sheba’s decision to seduce (or be seduced) by her student, other than to hint
at her own sense of bohemian freedom being lost at home, I can see how others
will find the reasons for why the radiant Sheba is so drawn to such a surly kid
rather hard to accept.
But it still works, because the film is so well-played. With
Dench and Blanchett at their best (and excellent support from Bill Nighy,
quietly superb as Sheba’s husband, a decent guy who can’t believe his luck that
he is married to such a wonderful woman, and whose world falls apart in bitter
recrimination), it’s a film that gives more than enough rewards. The film gives
us a decent ending from the book, with more hope for Sheba – but the balance
suggests that for Barbara the cycle of obsession will only continue. Heaven
help anyone who sits down on a park bench next to her.
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