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Dame Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal
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Scandalously good
NOTES ON A SCANDAL
Directed by David Eyre
Certificate 15
THIS film breaks the unwritten rule that a successful novel does not mean a successful film.
Zoe Heller’s Notes On A Scandal, a story about an art teacher who has an affair with a 15-year-old boy while becoming the subject of another, unwanted infatuation, is not easy on the eye. It builds slowly and requires strong performances from its leads. In Dame Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett and Bill Nighy, you have them. While the novel was a best seller, the adaptation deserves to be as successful.
Without giving too much away, the story runs like this. Sheba (Blanchett) is a rookie art teacher in a busy north London comprehensive.
History teacher and wizened old hand Barbara (Dench) befriends her by stepping in when she is having difficulty disciplining two boys – one of which is destined to play a larger role in their lives.
She is invited home for Sunday lunch, and meets the family – the significantly older husband, the child with Down’s Syndrome, and teenage girl going through the many trials and tribulations of growing up.
They eat and then go though their usual Sunday routine, namely dancing as a family, in a cringing way, to Toots and the Maytals.
It is the perfect portrait of a liberal, professional north London family, and one many readers will recognise as uncomfortably true to life.
Then Barbara is shown Sheba’s back garden studio – an inner sanctum which allows the viewer to compare Sheba and Barbara’s actions.
For Sheba, she is merely showing a new friend some of her amateur pot making, a porcelain project that smacks of night school courses.
For Barbara, the trip to the bottom of the garden is more than that: it is as if she has been allowed into a sacred space.
Barbara’s descent into infatuation begins and Sheba is set to suffer for her own irresponsible, and criminal, actions.
What makes the film is the air of believability hanging over every scene.
The slow creation of the relationship between Barbara and Sheba provides the suspense and as things unravel, Barbara’s true reasons for the attention she pays her new friend become apparent. Small discoveries build up through the film into a bigger picture, a drip-drip of revelation that leads to a shocking and uncomfortable finale.
Filmed around Camden, with Parliament Hill and Belsize Park featuring in this film I had fun playing spot the road.
It is a brilliant British thriller.
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