|
The unbearable
loneliness of being. This is the centre around which Richard Eyre's
spider of a film weaves its web. Structured like a thriller, it succeeds
in melding its structural and stylistic choices with a humanity, subtlety
and three dimensional characterisation that genre films rarely achieve.
Barbara
Covett (Judy Dench) covets others lives. Barbara is a diarist, a fantasist
and a narrator who cannot be trusted. Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) is
the deer caught in her crosshairs. They are the dual protagonists of
Notes on a Scandal - Patrick Marber's adaptation of Zoe
Heller's novel, set in a north London comp. It's a morality
tale with odd yet apt Restoration tropes - not least its title and character's
names. The moral is succinct: thou shalt not covet. Especially not school
boys. Sadly for neophyte teacher Sheba, she acts on her juvenile lusts
and gets entangled with a 15-year-old. When Barbara discovers Sheba's
little secret she clings to the knowledge like a serpent round a tree.
Dench's Barbara is a teacher who embodies Pink Floyd's notion of dark
sarcasm in the classroom. Her voiceover lends the film its powerful
air of institutional caustic bleach. She is wrinkled, raddled, cynical
and intimidating - a hated and feared school institution in her own
right. Dench's performance is monstrous - in all the right ways. She's
a terrifying combination of The Three Faces of Eve and The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. As such her Barbara is more than a simple
predatory villain. She is the husk that remains when loneliness has
dried up all else.
Into Barbara's prickly grey world wafts the ethereal long blonde Sheba.
Never has Cate Blanchett looked so stunning - a fusion of archetypal
art teacher and wet dream. The heady mix of floaty skirts, woollen knits,
golden hair and gauche manner results in something akin to Lady Di in
the early 1980s. Sheba is a child-woman, self-infantilised by her marriage
to a much older man (Bill Nighy). In Blanchett's hands a character that
could be intensely irritating, instead has an aura of impenetrable,
wistful mystery.
Barbara and Sheba form a curious, poisonous friendship - based on lies
and dependencies. Even before the revelation of her affair, Sheba finds
in Barbara a confidante and a mother-figure. But it is Barbara's perspective
as diarist that dominates our view. For her, Sheba is more than a friend
- she is an obsession, a soul mate, an object of fantasy. Her possessiveness
and jealousy gather like a storm during the course of the film.
Notes on a Scandal is not Fatal Attraction, but it is
a dark little tale. Claustrophobic and airless, it skirts the edges
of being a thriller without immersing itself in those waters. Barbara
is pitiable as well as frightening - she is small and human. In this
sense, it's a very English drama - far from the grandiose, it has a
lot of realism about it. But it's a little too slight and doesn't quite
fill the big screen. Marber's adaptation is pedestrian. It fails to
use the gift of Barbara's self-delusion. The field is open to play with
narrative angles, to raise doubts in the audience imagination as to
what is real and what is Barbara's version of reality. But Marber quickly
fences us in and leaves us knowing exactly where the boundaries are.
The glory of Notes on a Scandal lies largely with its three leads
(Dench, Blanchett, Nighy) - and in this, its glory is great. It's an
actor's film.
|
