And you thought high school teachers had no lives.
Ever have a secret so dark and potentially humiliating that it burns, festers and eats at you from within? For the hour and a half of
Notes on a Scandal
, you will be immersed in the
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experience, complete with a knotted stomach, wringing hands and bloodied cuticles.
Notes is a thriller, expertly directed by Richard Eyre (
Stage Beauty
,
Iris
), in which the fear comes not from the constant possibility of physical death, but from the looming likelihood of social death, in the form of public humiliation. The progress of the picture is accompanied by observations from the journal of Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), a teacher at a London high school who commands respect but not warm regard. When Covett discovers a dark secret about a beautiful new teacher (Cate Blanchett), intrigue ensues, jealousy and obsession run rampant and disaster looms large.
Dench's Covett, alienated by her superior intelligence as much as by her attitude, is alluringly anachronistic. She observes the people around her with a modern-day manifestation of the narrative voices of such 19th century novelists as Balzac, Flaubert or a biting Jane Austen. With perfectly delivered acerbic lines, Dench forces frequent eruptions of laughter from an audience boiling with tension. But it is Dench's amazingly communicative face that does so much of the work in
Notes
. Her furtive eyes, scanning for tidbits of ugliness and proof of stupidity to deliver home to her rows of neatly organized diaries, contagiously transmit her diseased perspective.
In one scene, we see Covett seated at a large dining hall. Her face expertly conveys an uncomfortable and tamped-down disgust. We then cut to an eye-line shot from her perspective, and see an unhealthy man with some sort of pink and peeling skin condition on his ear, as he dully munches his meal. That's it. And yet one cannot fail to laugh. We have been so thoroughly brought into Covett's misanthropic world view that we giggle at what we now think when we see this lowly being.
Covett sees much, but her eyes are particularly adept at spotting insecure vulnerability in younger women, like a hunting tigress instinctually hones in on the feeblest of gazelles. Blanchett plays this defenseless animal perfectly, save perhaps for a short scene in which she channels Courtney Love to odd effect. Blanchett's Sheba Hart has a life that seems filled with love, but contains a soft and vulnerable underbelly of existential void.
The name "Covett" is certainly no accident. In
Notes
, there is no love, as such. There is only the desperate desire to fill the vacuum of empty, lonely existence with something, anything, someone.
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But
Notes
is as sociological as it is psychological. The malaise of anomie and alienation seems specific to a
modern-day world. Hart's middle-class, pseudo-bohemian family life and Covett's isolated urban old age are viewed with keen disinterest.
A 19th century novelistic narrative technique is also present in the use of camera. Eyre employs what is the film equivalent of
le style indirect libre
, where the audience is often unsure whether it is peering through a character's eyes or through the lens of an omniscient narrator. This ambiguity, combined with tightly focused face shots, pulls viewers through the characters' eyes and into their minds.
Philip Glass' constantly crescendoing and relentlessly jabbing score induces tension at all the right moments.
Notes
deservedly picked up four Oscar nominations (Dench, Blanchett, Marber and Glass) and should only be missed by the recently manicured.
