And Dench by nature makes Barbara's emotionality believable without asking the audience for sympathy. There's always something welcome about Dench's refusal of easy connections with the audience, and here it moves her toward a bigger prize. Hollywood's legion of terminal starlets, desperate to be liked (and to be found as attractive as their granddaughters), are put to shame en masse by the fearlessness of Dench, who was over 70 when this movie was shot. In her hands, Barbara's story suggests how teensy a tragedy you can make of your emotional life. There are only a scattering of Shakespearean roles for women in this range, so Dench has essentially invented one. Though her story is outside the precincts of tragedy in a formal sense, Barbara acts with a tragic hero's combination of vigor and blindness. And Dench is so vivid that she turns this parched, underpaid professional into a confiding, self-defeating monster — Richard III in squalid middle-class miniature.

Cate Blanchett has always underwhelmed me, too, though in her case it's because she's so adaptable as to be forgettable while always appearing aglow with self-satisfaction, as if praise and stardom were hers by right, like income from a trust fund. Just as Dench's carefulness and reserve work for Barbara, however, Blanchett's sense of entitlement works for Sheba. It gives her a certain narcissism that explains why this likeable, intelligent woman would be such a dilettante — not just as an artist and teacher but in her private life as well. It helps enormously that director Richard Eyre shows us Sheba as Barbara sees her, in rapturous, silky slow motion while frankly preserving the insanity of her sexual caprice. (This is nailed down in the scene in which Steven breaks it off with Sheba, exactly as Barbara has spitefully predicted.)

Blanchett, a visual glory, draws us to Sheba yet does her share in dramatizing the perception that there are two, opposite ways of prolonging adolescent injudiciousness: by being totally out of touch with your feelings like Barbara, or by being too much in touch with them like Sheba. Barbara can't entirely repress her troubling emotions; they will out. But not all impulses are to be indulged equally, as Sheba learns startlingly late, that is, when her lover is younger than her daughter's boyfriend and in part only because the boy's mother pummels some sense into her and the police are alerted. (If one's superego is crucially underactive it will simply be externalized.)

After her exposure, Sheba leaves her house at Richard's request and hides from the tabloid press at Barbara's. In the third-act climax, Sheba, bored and uncertain to the point of distraction, puts on her old Siouxsie Sioux makeup, as if the answer lay behind her rather than before. She notices a gold star stuck to her foot and, in an expertly rhythmed sequence, goes from gold star to a crumpled journal page in the waste basket to a search for the full trove — Barbara's diaries, which reveal not only her feelings for Sheba and her plot to win her but the fact that it was she who informed on Sheba and Steven. When Barbara returns from a frugal outing at the supermarket, Sheba turns on her and Blanchett lets it rip, using vocal and emotional resources I had not previously suspected she possessed. It's a phenomenal scene, in which Blanchett not only extends herself as an actress but extends the character as well (Sheba finds some footing) at maximal dramatic pitch.