Notes on a Scandal
Sometimes I just love it when I go to the movies and find out that the film I was expecting to watch, isn't actually what I end up watching. Case in point. I was expecting to see an action/thriller movie about coincidences with Tony Scott'sDeja Vu. Instead I was presented with a fascinating popcorn flick about time travel. Sure it had it's action/thriller moments but there was more to that movie than just that. It happened to me again last night. I was expecting Notes on a Scandal to be about a teacher who sleeps with her 15 year old student. Yes, that's part of the movie, but there is so much more to it than that. It's really about Judi Dench's character and her desperate attempts to play with the mind of Cate Blanchett's character. It's about trust, betrayal, loneliness and despair. A couple of years ago, I ran into a teacher from my secondary school who use to 
scare the bee Jesus out of me. She was an elderly lady with this commanding voice and Christopher Walken-like presence who I made sure I never crossed when I was in class. When I saw her again at a supermarket, she was almost a ghost. This isn't the lady that use to scare me, she is old, helpless and rather sad. Dench's character in Notes on a Scandal is much the same. She's somebody in the school where she works as an ageing History teacher, but just like Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption, outside of those brick walls she doesn't exist. She is institutionalized. Without that uniform she is nothing. She spends every night writing about the mundane and dull events of her everyday life with fantastic wit and often cruel demeanor. Dench's character Barabara is painfully lonely and finds herself drawn to the new teacher in town, Sheba...played wonderfully by Cate Blanchett. Sheba is a thirty something women who took up teaching just to do something with her life. She's looked after her son who suffers from Down Syndrome (who Dench cruelly calls a "court jester") for too long and her daughter is at "the difficult teenage years" stage of life. Bill Nighy is her husband, even though he is twenty years her senior. Sheba dreams of the "fuck fest" days they had when she was twenty but that time passed a while ago and she's feeling old before her time. When a 15 year old student dedicates a goal he scored on the playground to her, Sheba's heart flutters. When she finds out the student has a mild gift for art and comes to her for extra lessons each day, a bond between them begins. The teenager begins to become sexually aggressive and it isn't long until Sheba gives in. She desires to feel young and lusted after and an affair begins. The film is at it's best, when Dench and Blanchett who are both two extremely talented actresses', light up the screen with their cat-and-mouse spectacle. Both of course have been Academy Award nominated for their roles in this film and you would be hard pressed to find better acting in any film this year. Judi Dench in particular, I don't think I will ever be able to look at in the same vein again. Imagine Robin Williams' character in One Hour Photo, just far more subtly sinister and you get the idea. Bill Nighy too was remarkable as the older husband to Sheba in probably the most understated performance of his career. There is no eccentricity with his character, he is just a straight forward middle aged guy who seems to love life spending his time with his children and his younger wife. Then the moment comes when he finds out his wife has been cheating on him with a school kid and it hits him like a ton of bricks. The pain is written all over his face and in the words that come out of his mouth, he is devastated. 
Notes on a Scandal is directed in an almost quiet manner from Iris director Richard Eyre but that's not a criticism, it's a huge complement. The story and acting of this film is so good that we don't want to be distracted by fancy directing and innovative visual styles, we need this movie to be nicely packaged and allowed time to breathe. The one thing that did not annoy me at times was Phillip Glass' score, which I found painfully forced and too operatic for the images that were presented to us. It wasn't enough to take too much away from this good movie, but it did irritate me at times. rating:3.5
Notes on a Scandal is a powerful film that grabs you straight away with it's intriguing story and stellar acting performances. It may get slightly clunky at times and may feel like three films put into one, but they are all satisfying enough in their own way for me to recommend this movie.