It has been quite a while since I left a film theatre so outraged after watching a film I have enjoyed so much. If I ever needed a reminder that the 1980s are back with all their spiteful vengeance, Notes on a Scandal was just another wake-up call. As if the horrid leggings and long shirts, skinny jeans and Israeli invasions to Lebanon were not enough, Richard Eyre's film takes us back to the misogynistic themes of one of Hollywood's ugliest moments, that of Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Disclosure(alright - the latter two were made in the early 1990s, but ideologically they belong 10 years earlier).

The film, which tells the tale of schoolteacher Sheba Hart who gets into a destructive affair with a 15-year-old pupil, manages to do the trick once again. The threat to the family unit is not the responsibility, or the fault, of the lustful beautiful, young married teacher, but that of her friend, old spinster Barbara Covett. There are a few novelties this time around, however. Unlike in the case of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, Rebecca de Mornay in The Hand that rocks the Cradle and Demi Moore in Disclosure, this time the single woman's evil qualities do not manifest themselves in being young, beautiful and lusting after the man of the house. The wretched old spinster in Notes on a Scandal is actually lusting after the weak-hearted wife. Also, instead of an American blockbusting cast, we are treated to Dame Judi Dench in a brilliant performance and to Cate Blanchett at her sexiest.

The film is so keen to expose the peril of letting an old lonely witch into one's family nest that it forgets to deal with everything that is interesting in the story: what drew Hart to her teenage pupil, and the implications on her and her family members. All that is beside the point of the film, which is all about how Hart falls into Covett's spider web. It is Covett who implicitly puts her up to the deed, explicitly tries to extort her after the matter, and rats on her in the end in order to take her captive and have her nasty way with her. And despite the artistic ways in which "Notes on a Scandal" defers from its Hollywood equivalents, the core message remains the same: a woman alone is dangerous, obsessive, vicious, and will stop at nothing on her way to destroy innocent families by leaching on their weakest links in times of crisis.

But if the fine acting and British respectability wrap the ultra conservative message in a more dangerous package, still its choice of protagonist is useful in exposing the true ideology behind its moralistic venom: what turns the single woman into a dangerous vampire is not her blatant sexuality, but her very reality of being without a family, of not conforming to the right social order. The spinster is the devil even after her perfect boobs are gone, and are no longer dangling seductively in front of someone else's poor hubby. She would penetrate your domestic bliss through any available window, door or crack in the wall, and she will destroy you and your loved ones. She may not have won a Bafta, but Dame Dench put in a performance deserving of an Academy Award. Even so, together with Blanchett, she participated in writing yet another chapter in the long blood libel against her gender. I much preferred her as M.