Dench on top form

Notes on a Scandal is a fairly nasty book and this is a fairly nasty film — very Patricia Highsmithian is the nearest I can get to it — but this does not mean you should deny yourselves the very great pleasure of it. In fact, don’t, unless you aren’t keen on seeing Dame Judi Dench at the top of her game, in which case I only have this to say to you: you are mad and not worth tuppence and go see something with Jennifer Aniston in it, why don’t you? Possibly, there are roles Dame Judi couldn’t pull off convincingly — a bedside table, perhaps, or a piece of cheese — but, with material like this, she’ll knock your socks off so long as they aren’t still in Sheffield.*

Here, Ms Dench plays the suitably named Barbara Covett, a history teacher at a sink secondary school, who has been there far too long and no longer believes that teaching can make a difference. It’s no more than ‘crowd control’, she says, and anyway ‘all children are feral’. Barbara is disappointed, lonely, bitter; a repressed lesbian who has never been able to explore or express her sexual feelings in any satisfactory way. She refers to herself as among ‘the chronically untouched’. But then along comes Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), the slightly dishevelled but beautiful and luminous art teacher (always bathed in light by the director, Richard Eyre). Barbara quickly becomes sexually intoxicated. More, she is self-deluded enough to think that Sheba will — must! — save her from her desolate, friendless, chronically untouched existence.