Notes on a Scandal

Obsession is sweet, especially when surrounded by secrecy. A secret object of desire makes a lonely life more interesting, fills it with action, drama and emotions.

When the young, beautiful, insecure and somewhat confused Sheba (Cate Blanchett) arrives as a new art teacher at a high school in a London suburb, the veteran teacher Barbara (Judi Dench) senses a chance. This woman could be the new object of her desire.

As their friendship carefully evolves, Sheba learns to trust Barbara, who buys flowers, gets a new haircut, and puts makeup and fancy clothes on, when she accepts an invitation for a Sunday dinner at Sheba’s.

Not surprisingly, she is bitterly disappointed when Sheba’s husband opens the door. Barbara did not expect a husband, and even less a difficult teenage daughter and a son with Down’s Syndrome.

They are so very different, these two women. Barbara is old, grumpy, lonely, poor and secretive. Sheba is young, elegant, sexy, wealthy and puts her emotions out even when it is to her disadvantage.

Whereas Barbara is closeted even to herself, Sheba is clearly straight and has no problem having sex with a 15-year-old student. He is young, handsome and pushy – a perfect antidote to her older, gentle husband. With this, the ‘scandal’ in Notes on a Scandal begins.

Barbara, like a good stalker, soon finds out about the affair and after her initial shock and anger, she recognizes this as her chance to chain Sheba to herself. Barbara offers empathy, an advice of a mature woman and Sheba promises to end the affair. But the affair does not end and Barbara is not getting what she wants.

She tries to blackmail Sheba into physical and emotional closeness, but Sheba resists. She doesn’t like Barbara’s touch and she put her family first when Barbara comes to her crying after her cat died.

When a colleague, the math teacher Brian, asks Barbara out for lunch only to enquire about Sheba, Barbara cannot contain herself anymore and tells him ‘the secret’: “Sheba likes younger men, you know. Much younger men. You are aware of her unusually close relationship with one of the Year Eleven boys?”

Brian tells the principal, the scandal gets into the tabloids, Sheba is suspended from school, thrown out of her house and lands at Barbara’s, where she finds Barbara’s notebooks. These notebooks contain everything that happened since Sheba entered the school – Barbara’s emotions, her judgmental opinions of colleagues, Sheba’s children, Sheba herself and her betrayal.

At the end of the movie, the principal, who is aware of Barbara’s previous stalking which ended in a restraining order, forces Barbara into early retirement.

Judi Dench does a superb job playing a neglected, narcissistic school teacher, who hates herself more than she hates everybody else in the world. Dench’s posture, her clothes and hair and especially her voice, which narrates throughout the movie in the form of her journal entries, reveal all that we can know about such a pitiful human being.

In an especially telling scene, Dench lies in the bathtub, thinking about the desperation that overcomes a person who hasn’t been touched by another human being for years.

Barbara’s conscious manipulations comes from an unconscious desire to have a companion, to have someone to love who would persuade her that she is desirable and lovable. It is impossible for Barbara to face her own sexuality, to get out of the comfortable and familiar lonely world of notebook entries to the world of real humans.

Blanchett’s Sheba is pitiful in a different way. After years of unfulfilled marriage and burdensome motherhood, she is ready to act on impulse and quickly falls apart under pressure. She trusts the wrong people and instead of getting out, falls deeper into a self-made trap.

Adapted from a novel by Zoe Heller, this movie has the best acting I have seen on screen last year.