Chronique d'un scandale

I saw this at a preview last night. 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). Great performances all round, with special mention to Bill Nighy in the Bill Nighy role. The script (Patrick Marber) is faithful to the book but enjoyable though the book was the film is actually - for a change - even better. Beautifully filmed in North London and Eastbourne (presumably the school scenes) this movie is definitely a must see.

Judi Dench and Cate Blanchet both have played the fierce Queen Elizabeth I in their careers and here they fight for the crown in a royal match that is as entertaining as it is jarring. Two civilized women breaking into very uncivilized patterns of behavior. A highbrow story with a tabloid sensibility performed with truth and gusto. Bette Davis would have killed for Judi Dench's part at the time of Baby Jane and although there is nothing grotesque in the way Dame Judy presents us her monster, the monster herself is grotesque. She explains, in a witty and consistent voice over, what's in her mind. The center of her intentions become so appallingly clear to us that Cate Blanchet's slowness to catch up becomes exasperating. Maybe her suffocating domestic situation throws her into the arms of her absurdity. She seems a woman searching for validation without any real vocation. A teacher who doesn't believe she can teach, a mediocre wife a light weight mother. Judi Dench is relentlessly solid in her madness made of longing and fears. I left the theater with a desperate need for a double scotch on the rocks, just to take a strange taste off my mouth.

Certainly a very stylish drama, riveting and brilliant, rising above the modern-day thrillers due to stunning performances of two very gifted actresses. It's both dramatic and funny, Judy Dench and Cate Blanchett are delicious and so talented that they turn a misanthrope cat and mouse game into a politically correct entertaining account. This strong emotional battle is not only something about teacher-student sex, it's also an obsessing blackmail. Without exaggerating it could be deemed "memorable", as revelations abound, tempers flare all the time and every single confidence is shared. Never boring and deep.

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. Abundant voice-overs usually point toward shortcomings in a drama, but here they provide irony and serve to enhance the dialog.

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. Madly hoping to wrest the heterosexual Sheba from her husband and two children, one of whom has Down Syndrome, Barbara stumbles upon Sheba's sexual dalliance with a 15-year-old student. In a Machiavellian turn, Barbara hopes to manipulate Sheba by maintaining her secret . . . with strings attached. Need I add that all does not go well?

In fact, escalating histrionic fireworks ensue. Blanchett holds her own in this emotional and physical battle royal, capping her incredible year (2006) that also included outstanding performances in "Babel" and "The Good German." As Sheba's husband, Richard, Bill Nighy also comes through with a powerhouse performance. The moody score by Philip Glass is icing on the cake.

At a tidy 92 minutes, "Notes on a Scandal" is highly concentrated and vivid. The recently announced Golden Globe nominations include Dench, Blanchett and Marber, so we can expect Oscar nods as well.

This is a story told through the proper subjective medium, film, with such painful, cynical candor for how Barbara has spent a life disabusing herself of any rose-tinted notion of life or people. The price? Absolute, utter loneliness. The dynamic human images we see our narrated by the day-by-day items in the diary she zealously keeps as a sanctuary, and an affirmation. The movie fixes on acts of indiscretion and disloyalty, entailing not just our scathingly wise narrator and her new teaching colleague Sheba, but Sheba's husband, the headmaster, a teacher infatuated with Sheba, and a 15-year-old student. Each believes their reasons are sincere, but are all entrenched in variations of self-deception. 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. This may be one of the numerous reasons why they're as compelling as they are. It's definitely part of why this is some of their finest work. It's part of the drama's mechanism. Were Sheba not the breed of beauty she is, a naive, impressionable, coddled pixie, then we couldn't appreciate how intensely Barbara wants her. It's not exactly love so much as controlling, envious fixation on Sheba's stunning upper-class ease. And were Barbara not a teakettle of seclusion boiling through decades of disillusionment, we couldn't identify with how distorted the manifestation of that affection becomes.

That's the marvel of the movie: It's about the venomous influence of loneliness, viewed through a tale of two people in love. But unfortunately for both, not with one another. Sheba becomes smitten with a cute but cagey student. Played with what seems like natural hyper-confidence by Andrew Simpson, he sees an occasion in the way she looks at him. She has no clue of how defenseless she truly is. It's not only dishonest and unethical, she tells herself, it's totally ludicrous, but when he cups her face and says, "You're beautiful, Miss," she melts.

Barbara, meanwhile, fosters an obsession in her diary, relating thoughts precariously bordering on fantasy. Barbara's seclusion within the school is total, but Sheba is somebody who hasn't experienced her acidity. Barbara can smother someone with good turns and not be rejected. She helps Sheba win control of her students. "One soon learns that teaching is crowd control. We're a branch of social services." Sheba asks her to Sunday roast, where Barbara describes Sheba's family with characteristically rancorous humor. Dench's delivery of these delectably spiteful lines is an triumph in vocal meticulousness and tone that is its own prize. Even when this apparent ice queen drops minute words of vulnerability like "Is that why she hasn't returned my calls?" there's an extra intensity in how strongly we can all relate to the insecurities of her inner voice.

There are giftedly handled, extraordinarily candid scenes of rage, humiliation and disgrace, and cruel physical and emotional clashes of immense force. The teachers are somewhat caricatured, but that's because they're filtered through Barbara's misanthropic viewpoint. If it's her omniscient voice we're hearing, it's through her omniscient eyes we're seeing what she describes, and it's the figures who allow her access to their humanity who have profundity and delicacy in their depictions. A wholly earnest Dench brings to Barbara that frigid reserve that's somehow one with a despairing need for consolation and affection. Early on, Sheba is basically an alluring figurine, watched from afar. When our voyeuristic chronicler discovers Sheba's business with the student, Sheba grows immense dimension.

We start to see Sheba's own manner of advantaged lonesomeness…or just tedium. "Marriage, kids, it's wonderful," she presumingly explains, "but it doesn't give you meaning." Blanchett brilliantly uses her character's advantages to betray her. The grim lesson she's about to learn from Barbara seems belated, even valuable. 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. It's going on in your neighborhood, not just Islington. There are scandals like this every year, and we dismissively conjecture from what little we gather. The cunning concept here is that we're seeing it through the sieve of Barbara, and whose transgressions transcend contemporary know-it-all assumptions.