On
this blog we generally try, with any given film, not to attempt to unravel more
than maybe one half of one percent of the issues and questions that the film
may raise. This restriction sometimes
hurts, especially with a picture like Notes on a Scandal that could
probably support a 150 page essay on its own.
This motion picture is so meticulously planned, so well storyboarded,
and so unusually rich both visually and verbally that it’s painful to pick and
choose. (Of course, it’s also incoherent
and preposterous in places. So be
it.) Here I’d like to rope off two
different scenes that feature the same exact surprising revelation about a
character. One comes quite early on in
the picture, the other much later. Let’s
get some background.
Sheba
Hart (Cate Blanchett is well cast in the role, especially in the way her
habitually loose, floppy clothes hang off her tall, lanky body; “Bash” to her
husband) is new to teaching, beginning her first year in the art department at
St. George’s School. In her thirties,
she’s begun a scandalous forbidden affair with her fifteen year old student
Connolly (Andrew Simpson). In the early
scene I’d like to glance at here a much older, psychotic, delusional veteran
teacher named Barbara Covett (Judi Dench does what she can with the hopeless
role) finds out about the affair; in the later scene her much older husband
Richard (the great actor Bill Nighy in a sensational performance) finds
out.
Barbara
is a lonely, bitter, misanthropic woman.
Her diary musings, given to us in great supply throughout the movie via
voiceover narration, show her to be vain, condescending, manipulative, hateful,
sneering, and a predator. (We learn at
the very end that a teacher, now gone, with whom she had a friendship –
Jennifer Dodd – actually hit her with a restraining order.) She is immediately taken with Sheba and
watches her closely from a distance, making endless comments in her diary. (In fact one of her diary entries opens the
film – she remarks that her diary is the only thing to whom she trusts her
secrets!)
Barbara
sees Sheba
as “the wispy novice” who is “artfully disheveled” and that “they flock to her,
even limp little Brian” (Brian being a meek, shy teacher who will play a key
role later). Of Richard, he’s a
“crumbling patriarch”. Their Down’s
Syndrome child is a “court jester”. When
the family does some (admittedly trippy) dancing after dinner, this is
“Bourgeoisie Bohemia .” Yet, her sarcasm and rapier hate also betray
an understanding of people born of deep and long experience – at coffee, when a
fellow teacher remarks to Sheba and Barbara, “I’ve got an announcement,”
Barbara says “You’re leaving St. George’s” and when the teacher says no, she
then offers “Oh, then you’re pregnant,” which is correct. She’s obviously seen the scene many times
before.
Barbara
and Sheba
first meet when the younger teacher is unable to stop a fight that breaks out
in class between Connolly and Davis; Barbara rushes in to help. She remarks that the boys are “little towers
of testosterone”. The incident gives her
an opportunity to establish a beachhead with Sheba , a foundation for a
friendship whose motives, we suspect, are not entirely sane or healthy.
Here’s
how she finds out about Sheba
and young Connolly- Sheba Sheba and Connolly having sex
inside. (In fact, the sighting is way
too easy, which is a flaw in the film.
Anyone could have happened by and spotted the wrongdoing.)
By
this point we’ve gotten the feeling that Barbara is tough as nails and that
very little in going to surprise or shock her, which makes the end of this
scene remarkable. The faces of the two
women are caught in expressions that achieve what I’m tempted to call a kind of
cinematic miracle. Dench, Blanchett,
director Richard Eyre and cinematographer Chris Menges all team up to create
something extraordinarily powerful. As
Connolly sneaks away, Sheba
has a kind of joyous naughty girl expression on her face that is worth twenty
pages of dialogue. Similarly, as
Connolly comes out of the building and walks off, Barbara looks after him with
a stare of incredulity that is absolutely priceless. Right here – in just this one clip of film –
the movie justifies itself as a piece of cinematic art many times over.
After
cutting to Barbara, shell shocked, alone, in her apartment later that same
night Eyre cuts quickly to Sheba
in a supermarket parking lot with her mentally disabled boy, moving their
groceries from the shopping cart to their vehicle. Barbara calls her. The comparison of the shots of the two women
on the phone with each other is instructive – the older, alone, in her tidy
apartment, holding the cordless phone in her hand exactly as well she might
have done with a cordless rotary phone fifty years ago, the younger, with her
child, balancing the cell phone on her shoulder, multi tasking.
Caught
red handed, Sheba
can do nothing but agree to a meeting.
Eyre’s
style here is very classically oriented – straight cuts, plenty of shot-reverse
shot technique, commentative music (a score with no percussion by Phillip Glass
that sets the mood). As Barbara
questions Sheba about the
affair Sheba
opens up in a way that she will not when, later, her husband finds out about
the dalliance in a much more explosive scene.
(Keep in mind that Barbara has her own ulterior motives, selfish and
personal, that I’m not getting into here with any depth –she manipulates the
situation to her advantage, to suit her own purposes. Sheba
explains that Connolly came to her seeking help with his drawing (as it turns
out almost everything of importance that Connolly tells Sheba turns out
to be a calculating lie) and that one thing led to another. She says it was “innocent”. (Interestingly enough, later, when she is
trying to explain it all to her husband, she claims the reverse.) She sends him away but he “refused to accept
it” and kept coming back.
But
here’s the rub – she tells Barbara that it began to feel like their secret, and
secrets are seductive. While she knew it
was all wrong, she says she began to feel “entitled”. It asked her, Why shouldn’t you be bad? You’ve earned the right (by being a good
wife, loving mother, etc.) – why shouldn’t you transgress a little? And so the bad girl impulse that we glimpsed
on her face a little earlier comes around full circle.
And
yet later, when she has the opportunity to explain the affair to her husband,
all she can do is stammer that she doesn’t know why she did it. We can have a field day with this, of course,
and all the circumstances are not identical.
For example, Barbara found out about the affair entirely on her own, by
being a peeping Tom, whereas Richard finds out because Connolly’s mother bursts
into the house and throws Sheba a beating (in turn, she has found out about the affair through the grapevine – Barbara planted
the rumor with the whiney, wimpy Brian a few days before and waited for it to
spread).
This
film, as I say, is very rich and abnormally well planned. Very careful attention has to be paid in
order to catch numerous slices of important dialogue and critical visual
information. Too, a lot of the
supporting players are very strong – I have to conclude that Eyre is very
strong with actors. Phil Davis, Michael Maloney,
Stephen Kennedy and Derbhle Crotty are all superb. Bill Nighy absolutely steals the
picture. (Watch the scene in which
Barbara is trying to get Sheba
to come to the vet with her while Sheba ’s family is waiting for her
in the car, to go to Ben’s play!) I
guess what stimulates me to include it here is the different ways Sheba reacts to
Barbara’s and to Richard’s learning of her taboo affair. As an overall example of the various
departments of the cinema it ain’t too bad, either.
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