Notes on a Scandal

I’ve often heard it said that secrets don’t make friends. Someone might have told this to Barbara Covett, but it would have been too late, she is set in her ways long before we meet her.
In the evocative film “Notes on a Scandal,” by director Richard Eyre, Dame Judi Dench’s Barbara is a is a twisted spinster of a menacing school teacher with more secrets than we can possibly begin to count. That she has a less than orthodox method of acquiring friends makes for one of the most riveting character studies to be seen on screens in years.
I mention secrets because they are the thing that give Barbara a reason to live. As the film opens we hear the phenomenal Dench narrating to the audience with the words she is penning into her little black book of a diary.
The narration continues as we are shown a cross section of Barbara’s life. Her humble little apartment is nothing that would stick in your memory. Her job, a history teacher at St. Georges School in London, is similarly uneventful, save for the occasional brawl among students.
Perhaps it is because we hear the poisonously honest words of Barbara, as the camera pans down her shelf of diary after secret filled diary, that the idea of her personal thoughts, free of any and all inhibitions, haunts us throughout the film.
Barbara’s life is made even more interesting, dangerously interesting in fact, by the arrival of a new teacher at St. George’s. Sheba Hart is a sweet, beautiful, young, inexperienced teacher, in all ways the opposite of Covett. Cate Blanchett plays Hart in a very likeable way, even when she is doing unlikable things.
Hart is not merely new to St. Georges, she is a new teacher altogether, and her inexperience is taken advantage of by her wild students, but more so by Covett, possibly the greatest scenario of a coworker from hell.
Barbara tells the audience of the way that the people around her are willing to open up and share their deepest secrets and feeling with her, something she calls a “gift of the privileged.” In a twisted form of mentor/novice relationship, Barbara and Sheba become friends and it isn’t long before Sheba is sharing her secrets with Barbara.
It isn’t long before Barbara learns Sheba’s darkest secret, that she is having an affair with a fifteen-year old student. Blackmail comes to mind immediately, but Barbara doesn’t want anything of Sheba, save her friendship, or is it companionship? We are ever startled as Barbara’s obsession becomes more and more obvious.
It should not come as a surprise to the audience that Barbara wants little less than ownership of Sheba’s soul, we hear her diary entries regularly, yet as Sheba realizes this it is still as much a shock to us as it is to her.
The story builds to an explosion of tempers and emotions such that in the end we are left astounded sitting in the darkness as the final credits role.
Many have hailed Dame Judi Dench as one of the greatest living actresses; this movie only supports that assessment all the more. Lately it seems that Dench can only be seen in supporting roles as in the “Bond” movies, “Pride and Prejudice,” “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and “Shakespeare In Love.” Movies like this offer audiences to chance to see her in full form.
It must have taken bravery on her part to take on such a risky performance. It has paid off with an Academy Award nomination and one of her most memorable roles in years.
Cate Blanchett cannot be ignored, nor was she by the Academy who nominated her for Best Supporting Actress; her performance is a remarkable one. She has never been more beautiful or frightening. For all those who thought she could not become more crazed she was as the tempted elf queen in “The Fellowship of the Ring,” you have only to see her as Sheba confronts Barbara about the things she writes in her diaries.
The Performances make this movie as interesting and memorable as it is. Screenwriter Patrick Marber adapted the film from the book by Zoe Heller, but it is Dench and Blanchett who bring it to life.
“Notes on a Scandal” certainly demonstrates that secrets don’t make friends. The audience, though, is bound to realize that secrets make terrific entertainment.

B+