Bovie Movie

British director Richard Laxton’s allegorical ensemble comedy Grow Your Own concerns a most unusual therapy doled out to local refugee families in London: an analyst allots a parcel of land to each group, and asks its kinfolk to farm vegetables there. Naturally, a myriad of complications arise - from a young man named Kenny (Alan Williams, who refuses to comply with the given ordinance and paint his hut red, to Miriam (Diveen Henry), a widow who believes that the spirit of her late husband has returned in the form of one of the gardeners, Little John (Eddie Marsan), to a Chinese immigrant, Kung Sang (Benedict Wong) whose wife died when packed into a shipping container. Matters grow increasingly sticky and complex for everyone when a cell phone company turns up and insists on planting an obtrusive mast in the middle of the land.

Lust, jealousy, and revenge come cloaked in the guise of friendship in this psychological drama. Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) is a history teacher at a high school in London; while elderly Barbara is very bright, she’s also severe and domineering, with a strong personality that tends to put people off. Barbara also takes a voyeuristic delight in recording the actions of those around her in her diary in the most minute detail. When Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), a bright and attractive woman in her mid-thirties, is hired as the school’s new art teacher, Barbara believes she may have found someone worthy of her friendship, though she’s soon disappointed to discover that Sheba has a husband and two children, a lifestyle that she finds offensively bourgeois. However, Barbara’s obsessive interest in Sheba is rewarded when the younger teacher confesses that one of her students, Steven (Andrew Simpson), has developed an obviously sexual interest in her. However, in fact, Steven’s crush on Sheba is hardly one-sided, and in time Barbara discover that the two have been making love on a regular basis for months. When circumstances turn Barbara against Sheba, she uses what she knows about the affair to destroy the life of her “friend.” Based on the novel by Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal also stars Bill Nighy.