NOTES ON A SCANDAL

I love a good juicy potboiler, and it doesn’t hurt when the leads are women (played in this case by the superlative Judi Dench and the wonderful Cate Blanchett). It does hurt that Notes on a Scandal’s plot—adapted from a novel by Zoe Heller—trades in stereotypes of the “vampire lesbian,” the frigid spinster, and the bitter, battle axe school teacher, but Dench’s acting mitigates these images to an extent that makes the film worth seeing.

Dench plays Barbara Covett, the longtime school teacher intrigued by the lithe (and blithe) new art teacher, Sheba Hart. Their names set up the basic plot device: through prurient entries in her long-running journal, to which the audience is privy through deliciously deluded voiceovers, Barbara writes that she feels Sheba is “the one I’ve waited for,” and begins to covet her close friendship and even her body, at which she gazes with a barely contained lascivious longing throughout the film.

In the typical vampire lesbian story, though, the older woman’s young “victim” is an unspoiled innocent. Although Barbara here notes Sheba’s creamy, unblemished peach complexion, she’s hardly a virgin. Sheba, in fact, is a spoiled, arrogant woman, who feels entitled to what her whims dictate. She teaches because she’s bored with keeping her home; she can’t articulate why she has the affair with [a] student, except to say that she wanted him. She unloads her superficial needs on Barbara, who soaks them up and twists them for her own purposes, but scenes of the two women talking in Sheba’s studio clarify that, in fact, the relationship suits Sheba, since Barbara is an attentive, apparently self-abnegating friend…

(The Feminist Spectator)