Best Friends Forever (BFF)

Okay, apologies – I have been gone from this board for a looooooooooong time – but please know it wasn’t because I was living some kind of exotic life. Far from it.

Saw NOTES ON A SCANDAL a week or so ago with my movie viewing friend, Grace, starring the succulent Cate Blanchett and dazzling Judi Dench. Talk about the year of the woman – here are two great roles for two actresses to really strut their stuff. And not in some chewing-the-scenery-I’m-trying-to-win-an-award kind of way.

Judi is Barbara, the old, rumpled, mean, and rather strange history professor at a London school in a less than desirable neighborhood. Cate is Sheba (short for Bathsheba – hmmm) the bourgeois bohemian new art teacher who has decided to leave her housewifely duties behind and teach. Like an unsuspecting butterfly, Sheba falls into the web of Barbara, and what begins as a friendship turns into a scary, freakishly codependent relationship built on emotional blackmail.

I am not going to give away what makes Sheba give into Barbara’s SINGLE WHITE FEMALE ways, but trust me, you can’t turn away. What a great foundation! Lots of tension, lots of ambiguous morality, and lots of London. Who could ask for anything more?

Both women are excellent and portray characters that are sympathetic and dastardly at the same time. Only these two could elicit such a range of reaction from the viewer, I think. I can’t say I’m going to see this movie again and again, but I did enjoy the story and I love stories without tidy endings.