I really wanted to like this. It’s something “different.” It’s two leads are female. I love Cate Blanchett. But for me it fell somewhat short. It was well directed and fairly well scripted. Judi Dench was great. Cate Blanchett was actually a bit disappointing, but that could have just been being overshadowed by Dame Judi Dench. I just thought she didn’t really do much with her character, nothing like Katharine Hepburn or even her segment of Coffee & Cigarettes.
I think my biggest problem with the movie, though, was the characters themselves. I couldn’t really understand why Sheba would have an affair with a student. (Although he was gorgeous, in that 15 year old boy kind of way.) Something was mentioned about how when she met her husband she was his 20 year old student. But that doesn’t really seem like a reasonable explanation. I guess that wasn’t really the focus of the story but it was still sketchy. The focus of the story was, in fact, the relationship between the two women, and primarily Barbara’s own predatory impulses. It all seemed weirdly misogynistic to me. Here’s this movie about women that’s actually, for once, a serious movie and the women are all pathological. And the “moral” seemed a little off to me. What exactly was the movie trying to say? That being a statutory rapist is really nothing compared to being a controlling, clingy, overly needy lesbian? Barbara was seriously creepy and her character totally played into this combination of the evil, old spinster-witch stereotype and the homosexual who’s out to “convert” the unsuspecting, vulnerable hetero.