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Notes on a ScandalMeet Single White Spinster. Barbara Covett (Dench) isn't just a fearsome, hatchet-faced, acid-tongued, twin-set wearing teacher. Notes On A Scandal confirms our worst suspicions about the ladies who made so many secondary school students' lives a misery: these sourpusses weren't just misunderstood, lonely older women. They were aged, Sapphic versions of Glenn Close's bunny-boiler in Fatal Attraction, and the last people you'd want to become obsessed with you, or to learn your deepest, darkest secret.
Sheba Hart (Blanchett) suffers both fates. While Barbara provides the notes, in her malicious, distorted yet scrupulously kept diary entries, Sheba, a bohemian novice art teacher at the same school, supplies the scandal.
Despite her marriage to an adoring older husband Richard (Nighy) and two beloved children, one with Down's Syndrome, Sheba self-destructively embroils herself in a sexual affair with one of her 15-year old students, Steven Connelly (debutant Simpson). Barbara finds out. But rather than expose and shame Sheba, she agrees to keep her silence. The price? A friendship and then something more.
Zoe Heller's 2001 hit novel enjoyed both literary acclaim and popular success. Screen adapter Patrick Marber (Closer) has cleverly maintained the book's sharp observations and its narrative momentum, while embroidering around the story's edges.
The script never overdoes Barbara's tart, often wickedly funny narration and cleverly opens up Sheba's life so that we get a more balanced view of the protagonists than the book's one-eyed slant allowed. Richard Eyre keeps the story fluidly unfolding and Chris Menges's camerawork subtly underscores the emotions of key scenes with his use of colour. Only Philip Glass's overemphatic score and a radically altered ending let the film down.
All of which is well and good, but Scandal stands or falls on its two lead actresses and heavyweights Dench and Blanchett bring the bout to ferocious life. Seeing Dench, so often the model of decorum and decency, naked in a grimy bath ruthlessly plotting is a revelation up there with Henry Fonda turning evil in Once Upon A Time In The West. Barbara is a monster but Dench shades in the desperate loneliness that has helped mould her. A scene where her brittle, closeted character is awkwardly dragged into dancing with Sheba's loose-limbed family is a masterclass in physical movement.
As for Blanchett, it really seems there is nothing she can't do. Playing this genuinely risky role, she abandons herself entirely to Sheba's kamikaze neuroses, fearlessly acting out the sex - not love - scenes with Simpson and challenging popular perceptions with the adult a confused, immature thirtysomething mother of two and the child a cocky, hormone-fuelled adolescent. And her family scenes with the great Bill Nighy absolutely nail a certain north London middle-class smugness on which, for once, we can trust Barbara's withering views.
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