CineMan Presents—Notes on a Scandal

Main Cast:

Judy Dench—Barbra Covett
Cate Blanchett—Sheba Hart


Barbra Covett is a veteran and cynical schoolteacher who is close to retirement. She is barely tolerated by her less brilliant and acerbic colleagues who know nothing about her private life which consists mainly of taking care of Portia, her aging cat, and spending countless hours alone. The only means she has found to take the edge off her desperate loneliness is writing in her journal. When Sheba Hart, a younger, attractive woman, joins the faculty as an art teacher, Barbra watches her from afar and has nothing but caustic things to say in her diary about her clothing and her care-free manner. Despite her disdain for this woman, Barbra finds herself reaching out to her. Sheba responds by inviting her to dinner at her house to meet Sheba's lecturer husband, who is twenty years her senior, and their two children, a sexy and rebellious 16-year-old daughter and a younger boy with Down Syndrome. Instead of opening herself to these people, Barbra immediately sees them as competition to be beaten in the battle for Sheba's attention. Later, when Barbra discovers her new friend in a classroom having sex with Steven, a 15-year-old from the school who has artistic talent; she realizes that knowledge of this secret gives her power over Sheba which she can use for her own purposes. Barbra promises not tell anyone but insists that the affair must end immediately. Sheba says she will but finds herself drawn back to the boy again and again. Sheba seems uneasy with Barbra’s friendship and is appalled when she discovers the older woman might have a sexual interest in her. The tenuous relationship between the two women reaches a crisis point when Barbra’s cat is dying and she asks Sheba to go with her to the vet. She chooses to go with her family to see their son in a play instead. In revenge, Barbra sets in motion the scandal that will rock both their lives in ways they never imagined.

It is weird how I find this movie a very entertaining film.

Notes on a Scandal is so unusually enjoyable. Its amusement in its own heartlessness, the approach that the characters are form, shattered, and revived by something other than the common qualities of people, e.g. Barbra's overpowering hold and wants on Sheba, Sheba's bizarre need to her minor student. (sigh!) and Barbra’s cruel plot to get that something from Sheba the thing that she does not have.

Sad....How the toxicity of loneliness affects our way of thinking.

Barbra’s attraction for Sheba is more than sexual, and extremely distant from sentimental. Those momentary touches she steals from Sheba are evidence of her venerable sterility; her real love affair is with herself and her private diaries where she is ultimately the hero, the knight in shining armor of those trapped in the lifelessness of the modern world, where everything is augmented to appear bigger, greater and more important than what it really is. This movie has really nothing to say on the situation of homosexual affairs, negative or not. (That is my analysis!)

It is true that:
One woman’s secret is another woman’s power. One woman’s fear is another woman’s weapon. One woman’s life is in another woman’s hands.... Pak! Bravo!