Stella reviews...
Notes on a Scandal
Oh, I don't know. It was fine. All right. Interesting enough. But it left me feeling a bit odd. A bit icky. And this isn't just to do with the film, I also felt exactly the same unease with the book, though in the film it eventually bled into disinterest. Zoe Heller's novel is certainly well-written -- I mean no faint praise there at all. It's very well written. And this is a good adaptation of a book that's harder to adapt than most, with its unreliable narrator and therefore the necessity of resorting to flashbacks and voiceover, both of which always feel a bit naff in film and are hampering to a writer … and yet. Maybe it's to do with unsympathetic characters. They're hard to write, harder to watch. I've definitely had my own problems with them as a writer, and in this case, neither Cate Blanchett's Sheba nor Judi Dench's Barbara are at all easy to watch, though having felt some sympathy for Sheba in reading the novel I was surprised to find myself with no sympathy at all for the film version. A more solipsistic, dangerously arrogant woman you'd be hard pressed to find. Eminently slappable. Which perhaps answers many film reviewers' question as to why Sheba didn't have another woman friend to confide in. Maybe she just wasn't nice enough to deserve any.
I was also relieved, having read several reviews citing Dench's Barbara as a 'Sapphic monster', to find her neither especially monstrous or even particularly Sapphic. A very long time ago Patrick Marber and I worked together in the same impro comedy company. He was funny then as a performer in a smart/dry way, and Dench had exactly the right tone with his humour. Not overly horrid, not camping it up, but cool and dry, and definitely the most interesting character onscreen, which along with her sad loneliness, entirely undercut the potential for monster excess. As for Sapphic content, I'm really not sure Dench's character was lesbian. The not-quite-ready-to-retire Barbara wasn't actually that old. Lesbians in their 60's today were among the women in the original Gay Liberation movement, the original feminist movement, and while there certainly is a generation of older lesbians who were forced to deny and hide their sexuality, they tended to be the middle class women (ie the Sheba types) who had more of society's approval to lose by being honest about themselves -- not the bright, smart working class women who made good through education as Barbara's character clearly did, women who already had some politics anyway. And yes, I do know some older lesbians (a very few) who still lie about their sexuality at work or in the wider world, they do not do so in their private lives -- they do not lie to themselves. Dench's Barbara was a less a closeted lesbian, than a woman scared of sexuality full stop, much closer to Heller's book than I'd been led to expect by reviews and interviews. So it seems to me that the reviewers who have insisted on calling her Sapphic and/or lesbian have missed the point entirely. (Or shown rather more of their own homophobia in doing so -- after all, not every nasty woman is a dyke, no matter how much the media would like us to believe it. Sigh.) Dench's Barbara is not scheming because she wants a younger woman she cannot have, she is scheming because the younger woman she feels a frightening attraction to is a sexual being, in a way that both repels and entices, disgusting and exciting her. So perhaps neither writer nor director were really trying for pseudo-lezz with Barbara at all? It might at least explain the unrelenting male gaze with which they made the piece. (It might, but I doubt it.) For some reason blokes just really can't get that when one woman looks at another with interest/desire/passion she doesn't (always) go for the cleavage. Cleavage is where men look. Which is why cleavage is also always what men film when they want to convey desire, while forgetting that every woman already has a cleavage of her own -- so if she's going to look at another woman with barely disguised longing, she's probably not going to go straight for the tits. Not always. Not only.
Richard Eyre has said he chose to cast Bill Nighy as Sheba's husband, precisely because he is absolutely not a classic bastard-husband she has to run from (into the arms of a fifteen year old boy!) -- but this simply compounded my main problem with the film. Dench and Blanchett have great chemistry, Nighy and Blanchett do too, but Blanchett and Andrew Simpson's Steven Connelly just don't. He's a good actor this young man. I believed in him as schoolboy temptation, and as a charming/selfish liar (as indeed, all the three central characters are), but I really didn't believe Blanchett's Sheba felt anything for him, sexual or otherwise. Maybe it was written and didn't stay in the final cut. Maybe it was filmed and didn't work. Maybe it was an entirely conscious choice to place the emphasis on the relationship between the two women and cut the youthful passion and twice-his-age desire, but it made it much more Dench's film than Blanchett's, when the story would have been better served by balancing both women. (I might also have warmed a little more to Blanchett's character if we'd have been shown any of the desire-led reasons for her being quite so selfish, irritating, and generally pathetic.) All of which meant that in the end, I didn't not like it, I just wasn't moved. And I do hope to be moved by film, theatre, books, any art. Holding a mirror up to life is all very well, but actually, I want a little more. Or a more interesting reflection.
A few unresolved questions -- why was Sheba getting all dolled up like a cheap 70's hooker before the big diary revelation scene? (Yes, the Siouxsie reference, but if she's 36 now she'd have been a little young then to adore her as she said she did, surely?) Why give the enormously skilful Tom Georgeson have so little to do? Why did the Philip Glass score signal everything half an hour before we needed to know? And WHY the weird scene at the end? Why undercut all that lovely, elegantly underplayed, heartbreaking pathos by turning Barbara into a bunny boiler stalker in the last five minutes? Bonkers.