Notes on Notes on a Scandal

I certainly can't complain about the acting, but at bottom it's the old "evil lesbian" tale that we should have long outgrown by now -- an aging, repressed, and mentally unbalanced dyke preys upon unsuspecting younger women, feigning friendship in order to possess them. And on top of that, we have the witless amoral love godess who succumbs to the charmless charms of a pimply, gawky, simple-minded teenage boy. What's going on here? It's a double whammy on women! A beautifully enacted woman-hating binge.

(Nighy was great, by the way -- the only mature, perceptive and beautifully reactive human representative.)

That was Thursday night. Tonight I watched Perfume with my youngest son, T. Please note that at home I am reading Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, in which a woman deprived of all freedom bargains for her freedom and ends up back where she started, or worse. I haven't finished it yet, but mid-Fingersmith I find myself watching a tale of lust for the extraction of the scent of woman, which perfume has such power that I'm reminded of feminist theories about the male compulsion to overcome and suppress the intrinsic power of femaleness. Of course my post-feminist son missed all that and saw a film about the largely unappreciated infinite diversity and beauty of scents. I, too, started out watching that film, but soon I was overwhelmed by repulsion at the tandem spectres of a man killing women to have their scent and a father protecting his daughter by depriving her of all freedom. By the end I was reeling and could barely remember the other aspect of the film -- its beauty and anguish.

Strenuous, exhausting. I really wanted to see Venus.