Few movies can make the viewer feel uneasy without entirely isolating its audience. I can think back to when I watched Ming-liang Tsai's "The River" (Tiffed!), which was already a disaster to begin with, and feeling uneasy during the scene at the bath house toward the end of the movie and ultimately being turned off from the movie altogether. However, here director Richard Eyre creates a story born of the suffering of two women, Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) and Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), and the audience is thrust into uncomfortable situations: a love affair between student and teacher, an ill-motivated woman's control over her object of desire, the teacher's attempt to juggle her own personal needs and the needs of her family. Notes on a scandal, indeed.
Sheba Hart joins St. George's, the school at which Barbara Covett is teaching and has been teaching for a very long time, as an art teacher. The school boys want to be with her, the other teachers wanted to be her, and Barbara watched. Barbara comes off as a pathetic, lonely woman, quick to expound on the travesties of life and the shortcomings and sadnesses of those around her, though never acknowledging her own sadness, as she scribbles in her journal each night after getting home from school.
It isn't a surprise that Sheba engages in an illicit affair with one of her pupils -- this would be the scandal on which the notes are based. However, what I found to be the more interesting part of the movie was how Barbara is able to manipulate Sheba, vowing to keep Sheba's affair a secret in order to serve her own, sinister purpose. The extreme emptiness of Barbara's life feeds her own delusion that she and Sheba could share the sort of companionship that Barbara desperately seeks in her life.
There aren't really any innocent characters, save for Sheba's husband and children who, when they find out about the affair, spontaneously unravel in final quarter of the movie. And 'unravel' seems to be an appropriate word as Sheba and Barbara are both unraveling, shedding layer upon layer of their being until at last they are a vulnerable core, naked, at the mercy of their own doings and the consequences they promise. Intriguing story solidified by great acting from Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench.
Rating: Charmed
