Notes on a Scandal

Plot synopsis:
Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) teaches history at a comprehensive school in London. A lonely old spinster, Barbara's only "intimate relationship" is with herself by means of a diary. When a new, younger teacher Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) starts at the school, Barbara feels drawn to her and believes that she "may be the one." Barbara discovers that Sheba is having an affair with a student, Steven Connolly (Andrew Simpson), and confronts her. When Sheba asks her to not tell the school administration until Christmas so that she can be with her family, Barbara explains she has no intention of telling, as long as she ends the relationship. However, Sheba does not end the affair with Steven, causing Barbara to taunt her emotionally and draw her down, leading her to end the affair with Steven. In months passing, Barbara's grasp on Sheba slowly starts to take hold, with Barbara manipulating and emotionally blackmailing her, causing her attentions to be divided between her family and Barbara.When Barbara's cat dies and Sheba's loyalties are easily divided, Sheba's husband Richard shouts in anger that her friend is being an evident pain and that his wife is being twisted by Barbara. With Barbara being left alone and angry, she seeks revenge by revealing Sheba's affair to a fellow teacher who comes to her asking her if Sheba is interested in him. The fellow teacher spreads the "playground rumour" to Steven's mother. Mrs Connolly then comes to Sheba's home and hits Sheba. Afterwards Sheba and her husband Richard bitterly argue. In Barbara's voiceover, she reveals she is glad that they are arguing, knowing that Sheba will come to her for comfort, which had been Barbara's plan to start with. The next day the media, as well as the school administration, are alerted, and Sheba's affair and her life are turned upside down by the collapse of her marriage, the destroyed relationship with her children, and the loss of her job. Barbara is fired from the school after denying to the headmaster that she knew of the relationship; he confronts her with a copy of a restraining order taken out against Barbara by another fellow teacher whom she had previously befriended.Sheba ends up moving into Barbara's house, believing that the affair became known because Steven confessed it to his mother, but Sheba soon finds Barbara's diary and learns that it was Barbara who leaked the story of the affair, on account of the rather sexual attraction Barbara seems to have for her. When Barbara returns from a shopping round, she is confronted with a furiously angry Sheba, who strikes her in anger. Barbara says she has done her a favor by getting her out of a hopeless marriage. The two of them continue to shout and fight with one another, and Sheba claims that Barbara never really liked her, but in fact manipulated her for her own personal needs. Sheba runs outside with Barbara's journal, to streams of reporters and photographers. She shouts at them in a deluded fashion shouting that she is here, but eventually is hemmed in by a crush of reporters and photographers, at which point Barbara rescues her. Sheba's emotions spent, she quietly tells Barbara that she had initiated the friendship because she had liked her (Barbara) and they could have been friends. Barbara says she needs more than a friend, implying but not saying that she needs someone who is a close companion and lover. Sheba leaves Barbara, placing the journal on the table. Sheba returns to her family home. Richard answers the door. Sheba faces her husband with the silent questions "Can you forgive me? Can I come in?". Richard silently considers, and then allows her to enter.Sheba is sentenced to 10 months, and the last scene is Barbara meeting another younger woman who is reading a newspaper reporting the Sheba Hart affair. Barbara says she used to know Sheba, but then says she didn't know her well. Barbara quickly introduces herself, and the other woman introduces herself as Annabelle. The pair continue to talk. Barbara mentions about attending a stage play, but then saying that she would much like a friendly companion to join her, which is implied to be Annabelle.

Tags: melodrama, revenge, flashback

Review:
Judy Dench is an international treasure; Cate Blanchett never looked better or created a more compelling character in any of her other movies, and I had the good fortune to discover Bill Nighy on Broadway in "The Vertical Hour" with Julianne Moore the night before I saw "Notes from a Scandal," and I now want to see everything he's done.
Watching the emotionally intense black comedy, "Notes on a Scandal," you, too, may feel like its main character, Barbara, who reflects in one of her many voice-overs, "The opera has begun and I have a front-row seat." Directed by Richard Eyre ("Iris," "Stage Beauty" and the exceptional TV version of "Suddenly, Last Summer" with Maggie Smith and Natasha Richardson), "Notes" bravely wades into modern-day Grand Guignol as the tension between its two female stars heads inevitably toward a showdown.Patrick ("Closer") Marber's melodramatic screenplay cleverly makes use of Barbara's voice-overs as she scribbles in her diary and makes jaded, bitter observations about the world around her.
In her juiciest role since "Mrs Brown," Judi Dench brings an element of sympathy to Barbara, a closeted, self-loathing lesbian school teacher attracted to the new art teacher, Sheba, played by Cate Blanchett.
As Barbara says, in one of the most tellingly human things I've ever heard in a movie, "It takes courage to recognize the real as opposed to the convenient."Dench and Blanchett, as Barbara and Sheba, share not only a gift for deep behavioral detail but a skill at withholding or telegraphing charm and beauty, as required.
People like Sheba, according to Barbara, and I'm sure you'll agree, think they know loneliness, but they know nothing of planning one's whole weekend around a laundry errand, or being so continually untouched that the inadvertent sweep of a stranger's hand ignites years of sexual longing.What I adore about the film is this discerningly intricate moral kaleidoscope weaved in completely modern domestic terms.
NOTES ON A SCANDAL is a Judi Dench "triumph" of brilliant wit, pain and a satanic passion for a woman out of reach in Cate Blanchett.
Too bad it is in the same year as Helen Mirren's magnificent "Queen" as Dench gives a show here in NOTES ON A SCANDAL that leaves you quite breathless to the last and final scene and fade out.Patrick Marber delivers a deliciously wicked, witty and crisply written script in NOTES, and it only enhances his reputation for giving an audience a story well developed and with characters that you can't take your eyes off on the screen.
His writing in CLOSER was so brilliant and clever, but in NOTES ON A SCANDAL he hands Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett words that are zingers and with a strong blend of anger, pain and humor.
I did at times have to listen carefully to the young actor's lines, but he delivered them like a pro.In the weeks ahead, I anticipate a "roar from the crowd" for this very dark and witty Judi Dench performance and who knows, she may upset "The Crown" in the end come Oscar time..
Nothing is as it appears and the film unwinds in the form of comments and voice-overs from the many journals of the protagonist.Judi Dench, yet again, sinks her teeth into the part of Barbara Covett, a cynical and acerbic history teacher putting in time in an inner city school.Enter Cate Blanchett, playing Sheba Hart, the new art teacher, fragile, naive, innocent and hopeful.
The tension does not let up until the very last frame and the viewer is never quite sure where this ride is going.Sheba and Barbara are very alike at their cores, there is a fragile 'fatal attraction' theme running through their relationship, shadowed by Sheba's impossible affair with a fifteen year old boy which is in turn shadowed by her Down's Syndrome son who is of an age with her student, and again this is shadowed by her daughter's coming of age love troubles and overall the shadow of her own marriage to a much older man, who left his wife and children for her teenage self.
It is a brilliant, absorbing little piece from Zoe Heller's novel about a teacher (Cate Blanchett, looking stunning) who has an affair with a 15 year old pupil and the effect this has on her relationship with a bitter, older teacher seeking selfishly for love (Judy Dench, looking 100).
Go watch "Notes on a Scandal" with Dame Judi Dench at helm, and make sure to bring your casket with you, because you may die of watching a movie that good.Years ago I went to see a play in a theater.
I, personally, think that Dench's performance is one of the finest I have ever seen.I wouldn't want to spoil the movie for you and give out details, however if you are looking for watching a powerful drama that will shock and thrill and move you with its message, execution and the story, please read no further.
When Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) joins the high-school as the new art teacher, Barbara dedicates her attention to the newcomer, writing sharp and unpleasant comments about her behavior and clothes.
This tale of obsession, loneliness and Machiavellism is supported by a magnificent screenplay and awesome performances of Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, two of the best actresses of the cinema industry in the present days.
In "Notes On a Scandal," (which enjoyed a limited release on Dec. 25), this delicate mean is most graphically illustrated in London schoolmarm, Barbara Covett (note the last name), whose rule in the classroom is adamantine, but whose grasp of words like "friend," "secret" and "love affair" are as tenuous as spider silk.Dame Judi Dench's Covett is a history teacher in a British school that makes the one in "Saint Clara" look like an accounting firm made over by the Body Snatchers.
At the start of the Fall term, change waltzes into Dench's life in the liquid form of new art teacher, Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), who is as lovely as an Elf and her namesake together, but as free as a Hobbit, particularly about the loins, which she can't seem to stop airing out around a treacherously-charming 15-year-old, Steven Connolly (Andrew Simpson), who is determined to pluck this Bohemian rose by means artful and sincere.When Covett catches a sensuous eyeful of the twosome during a Christmas pageant, this starchy spider sees an opportunity to cinch her snare shut.
Hart's family consists of a drolly self-amused husband (Bill Nighy), a teenage melancholic daughter (Juno Temple) and a son who suffers from Down's Syndrome (Max Lewis), whom Covett regards as a flimsy gauntlet between her heart and Hart.When she's not haunting the Harts' steps, like an insufferably-haughty shadow, Covett can be found out at her meticulously-clutter-free abode, adorning her diary with gold stars and musing about everything from lasagna, to the "pubescent proles," to her only true friend in the world: her dying cat, an uncanny doppelganger of Mrs. Norris, Filch's feline in the Harry Potter movies.Of course, everything falls apart spectacularly in the third act, with everyone's gory doings blared across every tube and telly from Bath to Birmingham.
When his character really should do something, he does not, and the audience is left to wonder "what if?"On the whole, Notes on a Scandal is very well written and brilliantly acted by Dench and Blanchett.
"Notes on a Scandal" packs more heat, acid, danger and drama into its brief running time than most films of nearly double the length.Directing Patrick Marber's script of Zoe Heller's novel (also known as "What Was She Thinking?"), Richard Eyre ("Iris," "The Ploughman's Lunch") whips up a rich, tart stew of heated melodrama, bitter comedy, cunning social observation and knockout acting.
The result is pungent and toothsome, a blend of Evelyn Waugh, Harold Pinter and "To Die For" -- a bracing concoction decidedly not for the delicate of disposition.Judi Dench stars as Barbara Covett, an spinster high school teacher of North London who holds the world around her in contempt and makes her way like a hungry spider, spinning webs of sticky charms to coax friendships from younger women who have no idea of her true nature.
Brilliantly summed up by Film Threat as "ennui with a pedigree", this is thespi-centric melodrama of the most overwrought, self-regarding and unconvincing kind.As the antisocial, delusional old maid Barbara and silly Sheba, the object of her obsession, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett are undeniably magnificent.
this movie is definite 10.i don't remember when i saw a movie as powerful and gut wrenching.Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench are 2 titans in the movie industry,and it shows in this movie.both actresses put on an acting clinic,with 2 Tour De Force performances.i won't give too much away,but lets just say as psychological dramas go,they don't come much better than this.the villain in this piece would have Hannibal Lector for dinner(with some Fava beans and a good chianti,of course)that is just my opinion of course.i know the character of Lector is held sacred by some.but watch this film and judge for yourself.for me, like i said, "Notes on a Scandal" is a 10/10.
With a great script comes one of the performances of the year, as Judi Dench fiendishly plays a game of manipulation.Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) is the new art teacher at a London high school.
In her latest offering from fellow English Richard Eyre, she teams up with Cate Blanchett to form explosive and terrifying consequences in could have otherwise been a tedious and lifeless melodrama.Barbara (Dench) is an ageing and estranged college teacher lacking any real relationships and on the realisation that her professional and personal lives are fading away.
When Hart crosses into a relationship with a young charismatic student and Barbara discovers them together, she begins to make personal demands from Hart and they both enter a caustic tangle of cat-and-mouse.The story flows well with both the of characters fully developed and fleshed out over the course of the film.
Fortunately, this is not the case with Barbara, who's character is more fleshed out and believable, mainly to her fun voice-overs and dialogue but also because of the acting chomps of Judi Dench, who thankfully played her character in such a down-to-earth way that it's never turned into camp.
"Notes on a Scandal" attracted a bit of controversy from those who felt its depiction of "repressed lesbianism" wasn't "progressive" enough for the "Gay is Good" times of "Brokeback Mountain." But while arguably a large part of the psychological twist of the film does, indeed, play off of the audience's prejudice against homoeroticism as inherently perverse (not, I confess, a prejudice that offends myself), I would not used "repressed" to describe Dench's character; "closeted" would be more accurate.
Judi Dench heads up a strong cast as Barbara Covett, a Secondary school teacher seeing out her final year in the job, when a younger attractive art teacher Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) arrives and turns her somewhat small world on its head.Sheba's gaining attention from all quarters but at least its adding some zeal to her otherwise dull bourgeois existence.
I was drawn to Notes on a Scandal by its three stars -- Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett and Bill Nighy -- who are among my favorite actors.
Someone else may well have felt the pushing gradually turning into shoving as the narrative progresses and loved it as a result; for me it was an intriguing tale of cat and mouse at the best of times revolving around two people we, in the end, are supposed to dislike.The film revolves around a middle aged teacher named Sheba Hart (Blanchett) who is a new teacher at a secondary school in England.
She soon begins an affair with one of the students but Judi Dench's Barbara Covett latches onto this fact and holds it against Sheba for the duration of the film.
In Notes on a Scandal, Judi Dench plays Barbara Covett, a spinster history teacher at a British public school, who narrates the story with tart, dolorous wit.
The acting performances are outstanding all round especially the always-reliable Cate Blanchett and the brilliant Judi Dench.
But it's also pretty smart, so this is one guilty pleasure you can enjoy without feeling too guilty about it.The scandal that gives the film its title -- a young and pretty art teacher named Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), who teaches in a rough-and-tumble lower-class English school, has an affair with a fifteen-year-old student -- is not a very original or interesting one.
Working from Zoe Heller's novel "What Was She Thinking: Notes on a Scandal", screenwriter Patrick Marber creates an absorbing whirlpool of emotional characters and private feelings, while Judi Dench's elderly Barbara alternately seethes and smiles like a Cheshire cat.
Supported by absolute class acting performances by Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, the movie explores the torment and the needs of the two women as each of them become friends and then the plots unravels the dimensions of each of these characters through gradual slips of engagement.
Judi Dench really looks like an ugly old woman in the movie, though in real life she is still good looking for her age.Cate Blanchett also plays a good role.
Neither Judi Dench's or Cate Blanchett's characters are sympathetic (they both deserve what they get), although Bill Nighy, who is given little to do, is kind of saintly.
While the story line of "Notes on a Scandal" will shock/worry some people, they will still marvel at the acting of its two principals, in Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett...I personally feel it has been a long time since we have seen two actors who have performed so wonderfully well together.
Usually,I do not trust on that movies which are described as a duel of performances.It's interesting the idea of watching good actors in the role of antagonists,but,a lot of times,the result is false,exaggerated,shallow and very little credible.I think a film needs a lot of talent(and not a lot of fame)to make effective the premise of the film,without forgetting the story and not to betray the characters to make important the good work of the actors.Director Richard Eyre and his excellent cast did all the things I just mentioned in this great film called Notes on a scandal.Eyre is more known for making historical dramas like Stage beauty and for telling intimate stories,like he did in Iris.In the hands of a less talented director,Notes on a scandal would have been a bad erotic thriller in the style of Fatal attraction.Notes on a scandal tells,greatly,a dark subject and the thematic and narrative focus is put on the desires on the characters and on the intensity of their emotions...or frustrations.Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett have awesome performances,but we do not have to forget Bill Nighy on another brilliant performance.The work of this three actors is phenomenal and they can transmit difficult emotions on a very simple way.The script,based on a book,is excellent.The force of the story,the awesome performances and the brilliant dialogs make of Notes on a scandal,a great movie..
Her Oscar-nominated performance dominates the film.After catching the new art teacher, Sheba Hart (Blanchett), having an affair with a 15-year-old schoolboy, respected battleaxe Barbara Covett is outraged, and immediately confronts Mrs Hart about the sordid matter.
Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett star in "Notes on a Scandal," a 2006 film directed by Richard Eyre.
Barbara (Judi Dench) is a very complex and deluded individual in this film and that combined with Sheba (Cate Blanchett) and her issues makes for some pretty intense scenes.
Notes On A Scandal using a technique developed by Eugene O'Neill in Strange Interlude tells the story of a pair of middle school teachers Judy Dench and Cate Blanchett.
Their scenes together truly sizzle, especially at the end.Fans of Judy Dench and Cate Blanchett will be well pleased with Notes On A Scandal..
"Notes on a Scandal" is a superb showcase for the mighty acting talents of Judi Dench & Cate Blanchett.
It's not everyday that actresses like Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett work together, so...
Movies don't come much more steamy, salacious and drama-packed than "Notes on a Scandal," a gripping tale of manipulation and obsession that showcases two of the pinnacles of modern British acting, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.In Patrick Marber's first-rate adaptation of the Zoe Heller novel, Dench plays Barbara Covett, a teacher at a London grade school who becomes emotionally and sexually attracted to Sheba Hart (Blanchett), a pretty new faculty member who is married to a much older man and has two children, one a young boy with Down Syndrome.
Armed with this information, Barbara is suddenly in the cat-bird seat in the relationship, all too willing to work her new-found levers of power on her "victim," sincere in her belief that she will somehow be able to blackmail Sheba into loving her.What makes "Notes on a Scandal" such a fascinating drama is its ability to make us both despise and sympathize with the characters at one and the same time.
Blanchett does the same with her character, making it clear to us how a woman with as much as she DOES have in her life can still act out in ways that are counterintuitive and downright deleterious to her security, reputation and marriage.Director Richard Eyre has drawn fine performances out of the rest of his cast as well, especially Bill Nighy as Sheba's husband and Andrew Simpson as her underage paramour."Note on a Scandal" is obviously dealing with some fairly heady issues here, but the intensity of the drama, the complexity of the characters and the quality of the performances make it a film no true movie lover can afford to miss..
The story is interested and well-told but what makes "Notes on a Scandal" worth seeing are the performances by Dench and Blanchette, two of the best actresses working.
Although not as physical as Fatal Attraction, Notes on a Scandal certainly has enough tension and superb acting to keep one glued to the screen.The story is that of an exceptionally lonely old school teacher named Barbara played by Dame Judi Dench (CASINO ROYALE).