Richard Eyre
Diario di uno scandalo

To define the concept of a wrong couple, whose members futilely seek a sort of existential fulfillment in a new romantic relationship, Goethe spoke of elective affinities, a capricious notion suggesting an alchemy that is not there, eventually leading to adultery and concluding in suffering. Nearly two hundred years later, things have changed, and common morality suggests that conscience should pay penalties inversely proportional to the objective severity of the facts, seeking indulgence within oneself more than atonement, a practice that seemingly remains confined to the narrowest individuality. Because when one learns that a man has committed a crime, they are immediately ready to make him 'the other from us,' as if he were the only one capable of conceiving and executing a criminal act. Indeed, when Sheba Hart's extramarital affair with her fifteen-year-old student becomes public knowledge, the respectable London bourgeoisie does not hesitate to sharpen its blades against her.

There is a story behind Sheba Hart. The story of a rebellious girl who found herself married and with children in the blink of an eye (one of whom has Down syndrome), teaching art in a high school and abandoning studs and torn clothes from her punk past. Then Sheba meets a friend, Barbara, also a teacher but much older. Barbara also has a story, but unlike Sheba, she has noted every single day of her past in a diary where she records every episode of her life, from the most banal to the most important. She pastes receipts and photographs, speaks of the women she secretly loved. Sheba becomes her new interest and must be tied to her. She discovers the relationship with the fifteen-year-old Steven and threatens to reveal everything. She, naturally frightened, promises to give up the boy. The simplicity of words, extorted moreover through blackmail, does not always succeed in achieving practical equivalents. Thus Sheba not only continues to meet Steven but also neglects Barbara, who takes revenge by reporting everything to a colleague. Sheba is expelled from her husband and from school, and along with her, Barbara is forced to resign because of her knowledge of the facts, and for that sordid story with Jennifer, her former colleague. They hide away in Barbara's house like two penitents but Sheba discovers the truth by reading the diary, discovers who Barbara really is but by then it is too late.

Richard Eyre is not interested at all in exonerating Sheba from any moral condemnation, faithful as he is in the screenplay to the novel by Zoe Heller from which the film is adapted. On the other hand, it would be trivial to point the finger at her and equally counterproductive for the film itself to portray the image of a protagonist as a seducer of minors. Eyre treads on a much more treacherous ground, that of the introspective analysis of the characters. Barbara's narrating voice which writes in her diary is a more than suitable tool to convey the idea of a 'soured virgin' who 'believes she is the new Virginia Woolf'. Barbara is indeed the result of that intimate practice that leads the sinner to seek forgiveness even before the aforementioned punishment. Her hidden homosexuality between the pages of a notebook represents a shortcut for her, to avoid the hostilities deriving from public admission, a shortcut that leads her to accept prejudice and stagnate in inevitable morbidity. Sheba, on the other hand, has experienced the hostilities fled by Barbara but then grew tired. She packed her bags and opted for the comfortable life of a provincial woman dividing her time between family and work. Her upbringing, however, proves compatible with the new standard of living only up to a point, anticipating the midlife crisis and succumbing to the advances of her underage student. The methods suggested by Barbara to Sheba to bring her back to the 'right path', beyond their ulterior motives, are still lies. Neither of the two women is indeed capable of reaching the root of the issue, seeking the deep motivations for the act: one believes in the lie, the other in addiction.

It is undeniable that Eyre would never have managed to create such a work without the support of two world cinema deities: Cate Blanchett (Sheba) and Judi Dench (Barbara). The two actresses show themselves not only capable of modulating a strong yet twisted homoerotic tension between the characters but they succeed in recreating an atmosphere of verisimilitude making it seem as though the camera is not filming them but spying on them. The affected attitudes reproduced by Dench are all that remain of her character's youthful aspirations for glory and celebrity, in contrast to the straightforward sensuality of Sheba - Cate, chastised on the altar of domestic sacrifices. The cathartic scene in which Sheba screams all her disdain for Barbara, the British press attacking her, exemplifies precisely the extreme consequences that can ensue from the chaos beneath a quiet bourgeois house or within the orthographic perfection of a secret diary.