Notes on a Scandal (UK) (BBC/Fox Searchlight) (2006) ***1/2Year: 2006iMDB
Director: Richard Eyre Cast: Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Bill Nighy, Andrew Simpson
An acting tour de force by Dench and Blanchett who befriend each other as Sheba (Blanchett) joins, as a novice art teacher, the highschool where Barbara (Dench) was teaching for over three decades. Barbara is a lonely old woman, moderately repressed lesbian, who has always searched for her soul mate in life, and hopes to have found in Sheba the answer to her quest. As Sheba lets herself stumble into an affair with one of her students, Barbara uses her knowledge of the fact to try and gain further control on her unassuming victim.
Sheba is caught between her feelings of unfulfilled life, her affair sentiments that she cannot shrug off and put behind, her duty towards her husband and kids and Barbara's manipulative friendship. In the end, the story and the denouement of the Scandal are not what stays with you after the film ends. It is rather the intensity that the characters feel, all coming from their struggle to find the life that they had dreamed of, none too fancy, yet so far from the reality that they are trapped in.
Posted by TheCasualCritic on January 30, 2007 01:08 AM | TrackBack