NOTES on the SCANTY

The Cannes Film Festival has occasioned another brief revival of that old favourite: Is There a British Film Industry? There doesn’t seem to be much of it evident on the Riviera this year, save that the blessed Stephen Frears is chairman of the jury, only the second person from these shores to be so honoured in its 60 years.

When I was last in London long enough to see any movies, I finally and a little reluctantly caught up with one of the most successful of recent native efforts, produced by DNA Films, among the very highest-profile of British production houses. It was a movie that needed the support of the National Lottery, the UK Film Council, the BBC, a Hollywood producer and a distribution deal with Fox in order to get made. I thought it was an utter dog’s breakfast.

I am writing of Notes on a Scandal. I’d read a little about it before I saw it and I knew of course that Dench, Blanchett and dramatiser Patrick Marber had all been Oscar-nominated. What none of this had prepared me for was to find that it was a piece of soap opera, about as penetrating and contemporary as an episode of Peyton Place. Flimsy, platitudinous and rooted in no level of reality, it seemed to me to be one of the most dishonest films I have seen in years. This is what passes for cutting-edge British movie-making?

It must begin, I guess, with the novel, which I haven’t read. It’s by Zoë Heller. I remember not reading her columns in The Sunday Times in the 1980s, largely because Jack Trevor Storey had done that kind of inconsequential diary so much better twenty years earlier. The novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize so I suppose people must have liked it. I hear that Marber’s screenplay changes the ending but what else is new in movie-making?

The tale is simply told. A young woman teacher is discovered by an older woman teacher to be screwing one of the pupils (a boy). The older woman manipulates the situation. Everybody gets hurt. There is a large measure of implied lesbianism in the manipulation. At the end, the “monster” is getting her talons into another young woman. All the lesbians of my acquaintance roared with laughter.

Though far less explicit than Frank Marcus’s play, Scandal bears comparison with – and is certainly no more enlightened than – The Killing of Sister George which (nobody else seems to have noticed) was dramatised for the big screen by Lukas Heller, Zoë’s father. He also wrote the screenplay based on the novel Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Overheated views of predatory women clearly course through the Heller genes.

The movie of Scandal is directed by Richard Eyre. I’ve known him for 30 years or more; not well – we don’t exchange Christmas cards, I’ve never been to the house(s) – but well enough for him once to agree to give me a job reference, even though we never worked together. When he first started making feature films, I wounded and perplexed him by writing in a review that he made wonderful drama for television but couldn’t translate the knack to the bigger screen. I cleave to that view. For television, he directed Comedians, Country, Waterloo Sunset, The Imitation Game, Past Caring, The Insurance Man and Tumbledown, among others. For the cinema, he has done The Ploughman’s Lunch, Stage Beauty, Iris, Laughterhouse and Notes on a Scandal. There’s really no comparison.

It’s hard quite to pin down what goes wrong for Sir Richard when he’s shooting a movie rather than a telefilm, but I think it boils down to a matter of pitch. The first thing that hit me when sitting in the cinema watching his latest film was the music. He had hired Philip Glass. This is so wrong. Glass is fine for an arty movie – something by Peter Greenaway, say – but his kind of mercilessly florid minimalism makes soap opera seem just pretentious. Something as deeply old-fashioned as Scandal needs a much more traditional palette of sound to confirm its familiarity. (Needless to say, Glass was also Oscar-nominated).

Cate Blanchett’s new-girl teacher – she has the cat’s name of Sheba – arrives late for the inaugural staff meeting, allowing Michael Maloney’s Central-Casting headmaster to discomfit her. This is all meant to make her seem interesting, unconventional, maverick but all I thought was that she was unreliable. What kind of nit turns up late on the first day of a new job? Blanchett’s performance is quickly a pain: ingratiating, generalised, loose. Who is this woman? And why does she risk so much with this boy? Why this boy?

Bill Nighy does his crumpled, whiny turn as her husband, requiring no acting on his part. Eyre shoots and cuts it so that you only ever see Nighy doing the parenting, implying that Sheba is a failure as a mother. Is it because of an emptiness in the marriage that Sheba takes up with the schoolboy? Or is it because she is a dumb bitch?

The boy is a further puzzle. Apart from his cheek, he has no attractive qualities and the boy playing him is very ordinaire. There is a ludicrous scene in which they get down to it beside a railway line, lying across her coat. Not this woman, you feel. As for him, there is a strand of reaction, encouraged by the playing and the editing, that suggests he is just making use of her and then will drop her unceremoniously. This, of course, is exactly what the film does with the boy who ceases to be of interest to Eyre or Marber once the storm breaks. Shallow stuff.

Something that goes horribly wrong in the film is the depiction of the media stance to the breaking scandal. Neither cinema nor even television drama ever seems to understand what a press stakeout looks like or what constitutes its dynamic. It’s as if no director ever bothers to slide along to one and have a shufti. Their take is always what they glimpse on television news, which gives no true idea. In Scandal, a small knot of rhubarbing extras hangs out around the fronts of the teachers’ respective homes and then shouts incoherently. It’s deeply unconvincing.

It would help if the story were not set in London. There’s no reason why it should be. A small provincial town would imply more parochial attitudes and a more stifling moral ambience. Also the press interest would look more like what is depicted here. I get surprisingly resentful of the London bias in film and television. If there’s no specific reason for a story to be set in the capital, set it somewhere else. Londoners watch less telly than residents of any other part of these islands and Scandal will have its largest audience on television.

There’s also a distinct air of cosiness, of an old-pals rather than a small-town kind. An abruptly truncated scene, seemingly set at a party in an old folks home, presumably depicts the father of Barbara, the older woman teacher, and his fellow inmates, but we’re not told. The scene appears to be redundant but it has to stay in some form because it introduces Barbara’s sister Marjorie, who later on has one key scene that, if it came out of left field, would seem even more contrived than it does as used. Marjorie is played by the great Julia McKenzie.

Also in the old folks’ home scene is Marjorie’s daughter. I couldn’t place the actress, while admiring the resemblance she bore to McKenzie. Only when I saw the credits did I realise that it was someone whom I have long cast in my mind as McKenzie’s daughter, Debra Gillett. Gillett has always been blonde but here she’s a brunette and that threw me. She played alongside Cate Blanchett in the 1990s West End revival of Sir David Hare’s play Plenty. She is also Patrick Marber’s long-time partner. Lady Hare also gets a name-check in the screenplay: she is otherwise known as Nicole Farhi. Marber got his theatre break during Sir Richard Eyre’s tenure as artistic director of the National Theatre. Eyre has also directed plays by Hare. As Bob Hope used to say, “it’s not how well you play golf that matters, it’s who you play golf with”.

There remains Dame Judi. She of course elevates almost everything in which she appears, even soggy BBC sitcoms. It was good to see her playing a nasty piece of work for once. A London friend, whose take on Notes on a Scandal mirrored mine, had recently seen her in the musical version of The Merry Wives of Windsor at Stratford and reported that “she was so fucking winsome, I wanted to run onto the stage and slap her, and it’s so not right for Mistress Quickly”. Well, she ain’t winsome as Barbara in the movie. Eyre sometimes shoots her so unflatteringly, it almost becomes gothic. And there’s a shot of her in the bath that, simply because she does it, is so very telling and worth any number of unresolved dialogue scenes.

But Dench is wasting her time and talent doing thin stuff like this. The great mystery is how so many evidently self-aware, thoughtful, demanding, intelligent people – Eyre, Dench, Marber, Blanchett, Glass, Nighy – could be bothered with such a trivial piece of shlock. Perhaps they were all in thrall to the Hollywood element, producer Scott Ruden. If somebody crass threw money at you and told you not to worry your pretty little head about the quality of the work, you might close your eyes, hold your nose and jump too.