Bricks in the wall

The movie business recognizes no such thing as an unfilmable book. In some cases, just the title is bought and a story invented, as with Sex and the Single Girl, or, in the case of Ernest Hemingway's The Killers, added on. When serious artists are confronted by seemingly intractable material, they make a movie about the making of such a movie: this was Harold Pinter's solution to putting John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman on the screen and more or less what Michael Winterbottom did when filming Sterne's Tristram Shandy as A Cock and Bull Story.

Special problems arise with books featuring what Wayne C. Booth in his critical classic The Rhetoric of Fiction calls "unreliable narrators," first-person novels where the world is rendered as other than it is or other than the author might objectively portray it. In The Innocents, Jack Clayton's film of Henry James's Turn of the Screw, for instance, we see much of the film from the central character's point of view. In Patrick Marber's adept adaptation of Zoe Heller's novel Notes on a Scandal, there is a voice-over commentary by a classic instance of the unreliable narrator, Barbara Covett, played by Judi Dench.

This is not just an ironic commentary on the action but a reinterpretation of the world around middle-aged schoolteacher Barbara. For what we hear on the soundtrack are daily entries in the diary she obsessively keeps as a shelter from her intense loneliness, a declaration of her self-worth and an assertion of her moral and intellectual superiority.

The film begins and ends with Barbara sitting on a bench on Parliament Hill, one of the highest points of Hampstead Heath, looking south over London, a position of solitude, detachment from the throng and seeming omniscience. She appears to be the film's observer, but she is, in fact, a godlike manipulator, a sad self-deceiver, pitiable, someone capable of monstrous acts, but not exactly a monster.

The chief object of her gaze in the story is Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), an upper-middle-class bohemian in her thirties, the second wife of a university lecturer, Richard (Bill Nighy), who has deserted his first wife and family for her. They now have two children, one a surly, teenage girl, the other a boy with Down's syndrome.

Sheba is the inexperienced new art teacher at the dismal north London state school where Barbara heads the history department. Heller reveals on the third page of her novel that Sheba is out on bail for having had sex with a 15-year-old pupil (Andrew Simpson) from a working-class Irish background. In the film, we do not learn of this until about half-an-hour has passed, when Barbara sees her giving the boy a blowjob in the art room. In the book, we are learning how things came about. In the cinema, we're waiting for things to happen, followed by the suspense, which is very well handled, of wondering to what use Barbara will put this secret knowledge of transgressive sex.

Initially, we think Barbara is a witty, sardonic observer of the school, an intelligent person made cynical by a seemingly impossible task of teaching in this place. She's self-consciously clever — witness her question to Sheba about her name — is it biblical (from the Queen of Sheba) or literary (after the heroine of Far From the Madding Crowd)? Her acerbic manner makes her feared and disliked by her colleagues and the filmmakers share her opinion that they're an idle, ignorant, styleless bunch.