Notes on a Scandal (2006)

Never Google your exes. I mean this, kids. Up until about a month ago, I would've sworn that the most depressing possible outcome of this would be the discovery that they're contented and successful, with a nice house and whatever the regulation number of kids is these days. Up until about a month ago, when I looked up C, who I wrote about in August and who introduced me to the works of Tarantino and Boyle as well as The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

I'm not sure what I was expecting to find - happy Facebook photos, perhaps? Cosy domestic scenes, children growing up, maybe (given that he'd been studying for a PGCE) grumbles about how hard teaching has become nowadays. A jail sentence for having had improper relations with an underage student, though? Yeah, not so much.

Notes on a Scandal has been on my mind a lot since then. It's the cinematic adaptation of Zoe Heller's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, about... well, yes, it's about an affair between a teacher and a student, but that's not the meat of it, not in the book and not in the film either. Rather, it's about loneliness and obsession, and how self-delusion can drive us to acts that we would not ordinarily believe possible.

Judi Dench stars as Barbara, a history teacher at an inner-city comprehensive school. Jaded and isolated, Barbara is nearing retirement age. She (specifically her diary) serves as our narrator, detailing the arrival of Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), a former potter turned art teacher who hopes to instil a love of art in the students' often bleak and deprived lives. Fey, Barbara tells us dismissively, but just like the rest of the staff, she finds herself falling under the transcendently beautiful but deeply naive Sheba's spell. 

Barbara craves company of any sort, but perhaps of one sort very specifically, and when she accidentally uncovers Sheba's potentially career-ending secret, she sees not a scandal but an opportunity. She installs herself as her confidante, offering to keep quiet and help her through but exacting an unspoken price in the form of demands on her time and increasing emotional intimacy. Of course, eventually something happens for the deception to be uncovered, leading to predictably explosive consequences...

With lead actresses like Dench and Blanchett, there was never any real way Notes on a Scandal was ever going to be anything less than quality. Director Richard Eyre gives them a great screenplay penned by Patrick Marber and top-notch support from the likes of Bill Nighy and Joanna Scanlan, and then lets everyone have at. The result? Quite the most elegant, engaging, intellectually and emotionally satisfying B-movie melodrama you're ever likely to see. The dialogue fizzes and crackles with spite and angst, with both Dench and Blanchett more than willing to abandon all dignity and likeability to get properly down and dirty. Pay no attention to the trappings, children, this is joyous trash of the first order. This is Whatever Happened to Baby Jane moved to the inner city, right down to the slash of purple-red lipstick Sheba dons as the prelude to a good old-fashioned screaming and throwing things breakdown. 

This is a magnificent film, but also a twisted, dirty, nasty one, and I mean that in the best possible way.  Highly recommended, because even intellectuals need a little trash in their lives from time to time.