* Don’t bother ** Rent it ***Matinee material **** Worth seeing ***** Exceptional

Notes on a Scandal is not an easy film to watch. Nevertheless, it’s so brilliantly acted one has a hard time taking one’s eyes off the screen, even at moments where the viewer may wish to withdraw into a different room — and in this film, there are several.

Intervening in other people’s business is the art of Barbara Covett (Dame Judi Dench), a secondary school teacher in a working-class suburb of London. Barbara’s take-no-bullshit attitude toward her students and employers masks a lonliness perhaps often felt by unmarried spinsters as they near retirement age and realize that they have no close friends or loved ones. Barbara comes home each day to a cold apartment, an old cat and her diary, where she records cutting remarks about her job and the people she encounters.

When Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) arrives to be the school’s new art teacher, Barbara sees in her everything she always wanted to be. Sheba is beautiful and talented, but also vulnerable; her bohemian spirit has been inhibited by marriage to a rapidly aging professor (Bill Nighy) and motherhood to an emotional teenage girl and a boy with Down Syndrome. As a novice teacher, she lets her students see her fear, and they take advantage of it. When Barbara rescues Sheba from two boys fighting in her classroom, she wins Sheba’s admiration and respect, which is translated into an invitation to lunch at Sheba’s residence.

So a harmless-looking intruder enters Sheba’s life and begins leeching off of her energy. Barbara deludes herself that she and Sheba share an unbreakable bond of emotional and erotic ties and becomes more and more dependant on Sheba’s presence. While spying on the younger woman in her classroom one day, Barbara catches Sheba having illicit relations with 15-year-old Steven (Andrew Simpson) a pupil to whom she’s been secretly giving after-school art lessons. Instead of reporting Sheba’s behavior to the proper authorities, Barbara realizes that she can win over control of her friend through a delicate dance of blackmail tempered by overt displays of friendship.

The whole thing is creepy enough to make one’s skin crawl. “She’s the one I have waited for,” Barbara writes in her diary about Sheba. By the end of the film, the sight of Barbara’s wrinkled face and matronly figure framed by a doorway is as terrifying as the killer in the Zodiac trailer that ran prior to the beginning of the film.

Dench is perfectly cast as the lonely, conniving soul who manipulates people while seeming to innocently drop damning facts into conversation. Blanchett, with her willowy beauty and poorly concealed longing, is a wonderful contrast to her costar. Nighy, as Sheba’s cuckolded husband Richard, gives a strong performance, as does her young lover, played by newcomer Simpson. Still, the film is carried by Dench, whose best actress Oscar nod for Notes on a Scandal has been completely earned.

Nobody in this film, based on the book by Zoe Heller, is completely innocent, nor can any character be deemed completely guilty for what goes down in the end. It’s easy to blame Barbara, whose desire to possess Sheba leads her to systematically destroy Sheba’s life, but Sheba allows herself to be seduced by young Steven.

The question of who to hold accountable and for what haunts the film to the last frame, as we see Barbara, sitting on the same bench as she was during the movie’s opening shots, making the acquaintance of another lovely, mildly confused young girl who will undoubtedly become her pawn as the cycle begins again.

— Blythe Lawrence

arts@thedaily.washington.edu