Notes on a Scandal

Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett -- ’nuff said. They’re not the only good things about this film, but they are a sufficient recommendation. As directed by Richard Eyre from a Patrick Marber adaptation of a Zoe Heller novel, it surmounts two liabilities going in, a spoken narration and an overbearing musical score by Phillip Glass, until the conclusion resorts to histrionics instead of a quiet chill of psychological menace. But you’re in fascinating company with Dame Judi and babe Cate, the former an old battle-ax of a history teacher and the latter a novice art teacher at a London high school, who fall in with each other out of asymmetric need. Dench needs the companionship of a protege, needs to touch the life and person of a younger woman; Blanchett needs the excitement she missed when at 20 she married an older man and disappeared into motherhood, needs the touch of a younger man -- much younger, a 15 year old student of hers. The older woman wants to be a confidante, but settles for emotional blackmail when she discovers the younger woman’s affair. It’s a game of cat and mouse that turns into a fur-flying cat fight. Again, the two stars save the film, because they make their basically odious characters intriguing and even sympathetic (something an accomplished quartet could not do with the misanthopic Marber’s script for Closer.) They each get a quiet scene at the end, but not before things get very noisy indeed. (2006, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-73.)