Notes on a Scandal (2006)
#38 in my 2007 movie challenge was Notes on a Scandal. It’s a short, but powerful story about a friendship between Blanchett’s free-spirited art teacher Sheba Hart and Dench’s battle axe history teacher. The nastiness of the film is dense and compressed, like a bitter diamond. The film does a deft balancing act of making both characters believable, understandable, and yet not quite likeable. Dench’s character is ugly inside and out, but her solitary meditations on a life of loneliness are heart wrenching. Sheba is short for Bathsheba, a reference to the Biblical story, in which a beautiful woman is seduced (or possibly commanded) away from her older husband, Uriah the Hittite by a handsome young man, King David.