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United Kingdom 2006
Directed by
Richard Eyre
92 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2.5 stars

Notes On A Scandal

Although the potential of Zoë Heller’s Booker Prize-nominated source novel is discernible here it is largely sacrificed by Patrick Marber’s somewhat anodyne script and Richard Eyre’s glossy direction. Its most obvious weakness however is Cate Blanchett in terms of both casting and performance.

Blanchett plays Sheba Hart a new art teacher at a secondary school in Islington. London. Struggling to control her teenage students she is befriended by Barbara Covett (Judi Dench)  a no- nonsense seasoned trooper.  When she foolishly enters into a sexual liaison with one of her 15-year-old students (Andrew Simpson) Barbara finds out but agrees not to report the matter offering instead to be Sheba’s confidante. However Barbara has her own agenda.

If ever there was a story that deserved a strong dose of realism (imagine what it would have been like if Mike Leigh had directed!) it is this one.  Blanchett, however is simply too obviously cast for her screen allure to lend it credibility with the film, as it were, splitting down the middle with the gorgeous Sheba and her young pretty boy falling on one side, Dench and Bill Nighy, who plays her older husband, on the other, homely, side.  Blanchett could have overcome this but her performance is simply not strong enough or perhaps Marber’s script not intense enough to achieve this. As a result we never really understand how a 15-year old boy could have seduced her or why she is so besotted with him, particularly as in real life Sheba would not have been short of offers.

On the other hand Dench is superb (but who would have expected less?) as the misanthropically  sharp-tongued daughter of Sappho.  Marber’s use of voice-over takes us into Barbara’s loveless world in a way that does not happen with Sheba and although we feel little sympathy towards the old bag at least we feel her pain.  Bill Nighy has a relatively small part as Sheba’s husband but we cannot look here for any explanation of Sheba’s behaviour.  Indeed, Nighy is so typically genial that it makes it even harder to understand.  Once again Marber’s script is wanting and Eyre seems uninterested in pushing the material.  As  result Notes on a Scandal is one of those films you find yourself redirecting in your head as you watch it.

FYI: I have not read Heller’s novel but apparently the film-makers have changed its ending which was a good deal darker.  Because it feels so uncharacteristic of her, presumably the change begins when Barbara uses another teacher with a crush on Sheba to wreak her revenge, sending the plot headlong to its new, rather pedestrian, resolution.

 

 

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