Cinema - Notes on a Scandal

The relationship between novels and their filmic make-overs is often a troubled one. Great novels, they say, don’t make great films. Or when they do they have a tendency to outstrip the literary original and cause everyone to forget there was ever a book in the first place. And then there’s the glut of supposedly un-filmable books; Ulysses, Fight Club, anything by William Burroughs. Almost a badge of honour in the literary stakes and an irresistible challenge for a budding film-maker courting a bit of gravitas.
Zoë Heller’s acclaimed 2003 novel, Notes on a Scandal looked like it might be one of those heading for the latter camp due to its technically difficult exploration of an unreliable narrator. Cynical teacher Barbara Covett is the self-appointed chronicler of the events which have led up to the breaking of a scandal - the discovery that beautiful NQT Sheba Hart has been having an affair with a fifteen year-old pupil. Despite the title, though this is only the surface plot for a story which is actually about the narrator’s manipulation of her knowledge on the affair and Sheba’s uneasy descent into her power.
Patrick Barber’s Oscar-nominated screen-play admirably negotiates this emphasis, filtering the first part of the film through the apparently wry, ironic voice-over perspective of Dench’s deceptively likeable Barbara before upping the tempo towards a thriller-like finale. Blanchett’s Sheba is appropriately if disquietingly shadowy - the object of everyone else’s desires and the owner of none of her own. You come out feeling guiltily implicated in the whole affair. ER