Well, that's more like it: a British movie captures the spirit of a decade--again.
As its poster implies, Notes(2007) is a rich, modern thriller hybrid. Although its lilting Hitchcockian homage score(Philip Glass) hints at the iceberg of devious fury to come, the film's inveigling narration positions it well as a comment on early 21stC Western mores.
It's also a logical moral reversal on Sidney Poitier's To Sir With Love(1967), coming 40yrs later to illustrate the perceived socio-political upsets since. Together with The History Boys(2007), Notes completes the picture of student dalliances with hapless teachers by depicting relationship inequality between adults, too. It dawns on us that morality should extend to a continuum of compassion for child-child, child-adult, and adult-adult dalliances.
Specifically, Notes is commenting on the easy sexual temptations of this reduced authority-gap when the "adult" is temperamentally not much more than "a big baby" herself. The Bathsheba character(Cate Blanchett), while a magnet for many as a delicate and beautiful blonde, is a disappointed hedonist. She's a spectacular departure from Poitier's "Sir"--the difference being Thackeray's admirable maturity and depth of character.
On the other hand, her "wiser" confidant Barbara Covett--(as in "to covet", Judy Dench)--is a tired but trusted "class warrior" of Western education who withers everyone around her. Robot-like, she long ago detached herself from the social concerns of her peers, and we're all in for a shock about what this costs.
Surprisingly lacking self-insight for a woman her advanced age, Barbara is now so hard up for company that she exalts in new friends (pre-vetted with ruthless prejudice). Scrapbooks which she calls "Notes" contain her social occasions, all rated for personal pleasure-value. Such childish characterizations as "Gold Star days" are a clue to Barbara's naïveté, jarring against her equally naive aristocratic aspirations.
It's only gradually that we recognize Bar's bizarre irony as her domineering style of "friendship" manifests a ferocious need for exclusivity. She is rattling as the older obsessor who's "not young", repeatedly losing friends to marriage and kids. Women like Barbara are sometimes driven to small-claims crime, or worse.
Of course, Notes opts for an additional gay interpretation of Barbara's "intensity". Its reason for Bar's repressed homosexuality is threefold:
1. Barbara's core underestimability (by Bathsheba and us) relies on her own denial of her orientation;
2. the film shows how blunt sexual repression skews other social equalizers, allowing it to indirectly critique pusillanimous panic about gays;
and finally
3. Bar's repressed homosexuality is the firmament enabling life's sardonic wriggle-room (whenever one person has a crush on somebody, their beloved will often have a crush on somebody ELSE).
The "wriggle-room" here involves full-blown "reverse paedophilia"--neither of these women are without issues.
Some will want to dismiss Barbara's problem by claiming that she's simply gay. She might be, but it's certainly not simple, and it's not at all what drives her dysfunction. Her denial is part of a deeper unexamined self. Sexual self-denial often results from society's need to extirpate homosexuality. Casting a "dowdied-down" Judy Dench was the key; no appeal to mere sexual orientation would ever do justice to the entire stern person that is Barbara. Nor does she fit any known mould of a lesbian.
More likely, her developing personality was severely limited by autism, psychosis or borderline-spectrum disorder. In her early search for identity Barbara became venally prejudiced. She never learned to love, only to need, and now serially preys upon singled-out "special friends". These younger females then become solely responsible for all of Barbara's hopes and dreams, tremendously pressurizing their relationship. Clearly Barbara's self-induced alienation should've been "medicalised" during childhood, because she still has a massive social disability. Colleagues merely loathe her, unhelpfully.
It's both shocking and tragic to see the venal spinster unable to learn from her mistakes: where are/were the disabusing social workers and mental health-care professionals? Why is standing up to her left to her victims?
Gay or straight, why does Barbara pass for "normal"?
Surely society needs to deal much better with personality-spectrum disorders. There are too many opportunities for "friends"/relatives to psychologically devastate each other in private.
Based on the Booker Prize-nominated novel by Zoe Heller (not Joseph's niece--Zoe's English), the film too is an instant classic. A rare example of a film adaptation improving the plot's expression, Notes(2007) makes tonal changes more explicit with active combat between its leads.
Consummate editing(John Bloom) and direction(Richard Eyre) ensured that the "pickup" scenes were all remarkable for their pitch--Notes will of course be remembered for its Pyrrhic confrontations. The talented casting(Shaheen Baig) allows everyone to utterly inhabit their characters, even the children; and Judy Dench's Barbara constitutes the most accurate casting of her career.
Bill Nighy(of Wycliffe fame) is no slouch either. His unflattering "crumbling patriarch" is even more honest and pitch-perfect than in his similar Love Actually(2005) role. Nighy's cuckolded pleading at the door is a study in the cost of betrayal.
Nevertheless, Sheba 's "Mind the gap" speech probably represents the film best. It's responsible for her waywardness to offset "the quotidian awfulness of things", while shedding light on our own similarly unmet expectations. Seeing Sheba 's humiliated recovery to the reality of things after primal-screaming at the aggressive journalists, we finally get her "entitled" hedonism as very much a"gap" from "life as it is". Being "a big baby" costs too much, even for Sheba.
Notes' closing bench scene is the "buttoning" that stamps the success of the film; it's better shock-value than the book's mere nasty confusion was. It's a thunderclap ending when NOTHING CHANGES. The AVO(Apprehended Violence Order) did nothing to dissuade Barbara from "Covetting" replacement relationships with which to re-offend.
Its frankness about such private/public issues of trust makes Notes(2007) a welcome if explosive reward. Not all green-lit pictures should obey Wasserman's "hopeful" formula; occasionally we still need art's accusing finger of the unexamined routine pointed at us.(10/10)
As its poster implies, Notes(2007) is a rich, modern thriller hybrid. Although its lilting Hitchcockian homage score(Philip Glass) hints at the iceberg of devious fury to come, the film's inveigling narration positions it well as a comment on early 21stC Western mores.
It's also a logical moral reversal on Sidney Poitier's To Sir With Love(1967), coming 40yrs later to illustrate the perceived socio-political upsets since. Together with The History Boys(2007), Notes completes the picture of student dalliances with hapless teachers by depicting relationship inequality between adults, too. It dawns on us that morality should extend to a continuum of compassion for child-child, child-adult, and adult-adult dalliances.
Specifically, Notes is commenting on the easy sexual temptations of this reduced authority-gap when the "adult" is temperamentally not much more than "a big baby" herself. The Bathsheba character(Cate Blanchett), while a magnet for many as a delicate and beautiful blonde, is a disappointed hedonist. She's a spectacular departure from Poitier's "Sir"--the difference being Thackeray's admirable maturity and depth of character.
On the other hand, her "wiser" confidant Barbara Covett--(as in "to covet", Judy Dench)--is a tired but trusted "class warrior" of Western education who withers everyone around her. Robot-like, she long ago detached herself from the social concerns of her peers, and we're all in for a shock about what this costs.
Surprisingly lacking self-insight for a woman her advanced age, Barbara is now so hard up for company that she exalts in new friends (pre-vetted with ruthless prejudice). Scrapbooks which she calls "Notes" contain her social occasions, all rated for personal pleasure-value. Such childish characterizations as "Gold Star days" are a clue to Barbara's naïveté, jarring against her equally naive aristocratic aspirations.
It's only gradually that we recognize Bar's bizarre irony as her domineering style of "friendship" manifests a ferocious need for exclusivity. She is rattling as the older obsessor who's "not young", repeatedly losing friends to marriage and kids. Women like Barbara are sometimes driven to small-claims crime, or worse.
Of course, Notes opts for an additional gay interpretation of Barbara's "intensity". Its reason for Bar's repressed homosexuality is threefold:
1. Barbara's core underestimability (by Bathsheba and us) relies on her own denial of her orientation;
2. the film shows how blunt sexual repression skews other social equalizers, allowing it to indirectly critique pusillanimous panic about gays;
and finally
3. Bar's repressed homosexuality is the firmament enabling life's sardonic wriggle-room (whenever one person has a crush on somebody, their beloved will often have a crush on somebody ELSE).
The "wriggle-room" here involves full-blown "reverse paedophilia"--neither of these women are without issues.
Some will want to dismiss Barbara's problem by claiming that she's simply gay. She might be, but it's certainly not simple, and it's not at all what drives her dysfunction. Her denial is part of a deeper unexamined self. Sexual self-denial often results from society's need to extirpate homosexuality. Casting a "dowdied-down" Judy Dench was the key; no appeal to mere sexual orientation would ever do justice to the entire stern person that is Barbara. Nor does she fit any known mould of a lesbian.
More likely, her developing personality was severely limited by autism, psychosis or borderline-spectrum disorder. In her early search for identity Barbara became venally prejudiced. She never learned to love, only to need, and now serially preys upon singled-out "special friends". These younger females then become solely responsible for all of Barbara's hopes and dreams, tremendously pressurizing their relationship. Clearly Barbara's self-induced alienation should've been "medicalised" during childhood, because she still has a massive social disability. Colleagues merely loathe her, unhelpfully.
It's both shocking and tragic to see the venal spinster unable to learn from her mistakes: where are/were the disabusing social workers and mental health-care professionals? Why is standing up to her left to her victims?
Gay or straight, why does Barbara pass for "normal"?
Surely society needs to deal much better with personality-spectrum disorders. There are too many opportunities for "friends"/relatives to psychologically devastate each other in private.
Based on the Booker Prize-nominated novel by Zoe Heller (not Joseph's niece--Zoe's English), the film too is an instant classic. A rare example of a film adaptation improving the plot's expression, Notes(2007) makes tonal changes more explicit with active combat between its leads.
Consummate editing(John Bloom) and direction(Richard Eyre) ensured that the "pickup" scenes were all remarkable for their pitch--Notes will of course be remembered for its Pyrrhic confrontations. The talented casting(Shaheen Baig) allows everyone to utterly inhabit their characters, even the children; and Judy Dench's Barbara constitutes the most accurate casting of her career.
Bill Nighy(of Wycliffe fame) is no slouch either. His unflattering "crumbling patriarch" is even more honest and pitch-perfect than in his similar Love Actually(2005) role. Nighy's cuckolded pleading at the door is a study in the cost of betrayal.
Nevertheless, Sheba 's "Mind the gap" speech probably represents the film best. It's responsible for her waywardness to offset "the quotidian awfulness of things", while shedding light on our own similarly unmet expectations. Seeing Sheba 's humiliated recovery to the reality of things after primal-screaming at the aggressive journalists, we finally get her "entitled" hedonism as very much a"gap" from "life as it is". Being "a big baby" costs too much, even for Sheba.
Notes' closing bench scene is the "buttoning" that stamps the success of the film; it's better shock-value than the book's mere nasty confusion was. It's a thunderclap ending when NOTHING CHANGES. The AVO(Apprehended Violence Order) did nothing to dissuade Barbara from "Covetting" replacement relationships with which to re-offend.
Its frankness about such private/public issues of trust makes Notes(2007) a welcome if explosive reward. Not all green-lit pictures should obey Wasserman's "hopeful" formula; occasionally we still need art's accusing finger of the unexamined routine pointed at us.(10/10)
