Barbara makes her boldest physical move at Sheba's house just when Sheba is expecting Steven, whom she couldn't resist seeing again. (Sheba should know better, but it's made clear that this fox-eyed scamp with burning cheeks seduces her rather than the reverse. Sheba isn't a predator, merely a fool, though far less deluded and remote in the movie than in the book.) This allows Barbara to increase her demands, imagining that she'll be able to break Sheba away from her family and even that it's for Sheba's greater happiness that she's doing so. When those demands become too great for Sheba, as they had for Jennifer, a spent Barbara, smeared with dirt from grubbing Portia's grave into which she also throws an expensive gift from Sheba, tattles to a fellow teacher with the lethal cunning of a Borgia courtier. The repercussions extend beyond Barbara's expectations but she doesn't care because the two unemployed ladies end up alone together in Barbara's basement flat.
It is not a sense of duty that makes me go into the plot in such detail, but something more like gourmandise: I could talk about this movie non-stop for weeks on end. The characters' motives are base enough, and there's an odd combination of petty incidents having walloping consequences, but the ironies are as delicately layered and "delicious" as they could possibly be without a hint of preciosity. We're always aware that we're watching an ironic comedy about two women who can't control their lust and who bollocks their way into a parody of a relationship. At the same time, this wicked, pungent entertainment is also a work of sensibility, partaking of the still-vibrant tradition of the English novel (as did Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice, Julian Fellowes's Separate Lies, and the Australian John Hillcoat and Nick Cave's The Proposition [all 2005]).
Barbara's narration is an amazing combination of acute observation of character and class; nastiness and conniving that wouldn't be out of place in an abduction melodrama; and girlishly exalted sexual reveries and bitter resentment when abruptly awakened from them. The narration, which in the novel Barbara writes retrospectively with the goal of "shed[ding] a little light on the true nature of [Sheba's] personality", tells us much more about Barbara herself. Thus, we are privy to the workings of Barbara's strong mind as it is warped by her emotions, at the same time that she pushes the story along, chop chop.
Although Barbara manipulates Sheba in the manner of a villainous seducer, and both women's offenses resemble romances of temptation, their stories have been conceived in terms of novelistic identification rather than allegorical admonition. That is, Barbara is not the personification of Sheba's temptation and its consequences — she's not apparitional (as Glenn Close is in Fatal Attraction [1987] by way of contrast). Thus, the whole raft of allegorical surnames — Covett, Hart, Pabblem, Rumer, Shreve, Bangs, Self — register without making the story symbolic or didactic. Barbara never becomes a "type," not even in the book when she attaches the Pecksniffian euphemism of "Sheba's unofficial guardian" to herself to justify rummaging in the younger woman's handbag. One of the great ironies of this brisk, candid approach to character is that Barbara's self-deception is so exactingly portrayed you wouldn't have a keener sense of what it's like to be Barbara if you were Barbara.
Article comments
1 - Michael J. West
Nice review. I never saw this one; my wife went with a girl friend to see it and loved it, but also found it quite disturbing. (On that note, nice Siouxsie Sioux reference, too. :-D)
Doesn't it almost seem redundant at this point to say that Judi Dench turned in a masterful performance?
2 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment, Michael. Disturbing to identify with such a character, but also disturbing that loving Siouxsie Sioux is now a sign of middle-age! Mais où sont les fucking neiges d'antan?
As I tried to say in shorter compass in the review, Judi Dench’s performances may generally be masterful on a technical level but are not necessarily appropriate for the material she’s given. She has a distinctively commanding air onscreen but her personality is less notable for what it gives than for what it withholds. This makes her technical skill more apparent"what else is there to pay attention to?"but not very involving. She lacks the playfulness of many English theatrical crossovers, e.g., Edith Evans, Leslie Howard, Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Wendy Hiller, Vivien Leigh, Alec Guinness, Maggie Smith, Ian Richardson, a quality that makes me happy to watch them in anything. As a result, although directors will cast Dench in anything “classy,” her actual range is quite limited. Barbara in Notes on a Scandal is smack in the middle of that range so all the skill and even the reserve resonate for once, and in fact are highly amusing.
3 - Michael J. West
I suppose that's true. Dench's best work has always called for theatricality, technically precision, and humorlessness--she's easily the greatest Lady MacBeth I've ever seen--but I'm not sure it's an accident that she sometimes spins comedy out of that dourness. Witness her brief turn as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love.
4 - Alan Dale
Shakespeare in Love would be an exception to my comments about her, but it may be an exception that proves the rule. How could she NOT get laughs in those two great roles in The Importance of Being Earnest and Pride & Prejudice? You'd have to work at it. Perhaps the humorlessness was ideologically motivated, but that doesn't make it more palatable.
5 - Michael J. West
Ideologically motivated? How do you mean?
6 - Alan Dale
British literary, theater, and film folk are generally pretty left-wing. I got the sense from the way Dench was presented as Lady Catherine in Pride & Prejudice--her delivery, the make-up, the lighting--that the intention was to show how truly horrid upper-class pride could be. That's part of Austen's intention, too, to make D'Arcy's pride seem less repellent by contrast. But Lady Catherine's pomposity in the book is laugh-out-loud funny, and it's a huge loss to emphasize an ideological point that's inherent in the character at the expense of the wit that is equally important.