Tamara Drewe

2010. Dir: Stephen Frears. Starring: Gemma Arterton, Luke Evans, Dominic Cooper, Roger Allam and Tamsin Grieg. ●●●●○



Here in the UK we have two left leaning broadsheets; The Independent (which I persoanlly am a reader) and The Guardian which hosted Posy Simmonds comic strip about a Country Girl returning from London, loosely based on Thomas Hardy's Far from the Maddening Crowd. Therefore I hadn't come across her award winning prose, nevertheless having seen the big screen adaptation of 'Tamara Drewe' I feel as though I may have done. The four panel with a joke structure clearly evident in the way Moira Buffini's screenplay had been developed.



The plot follows Gemma Arterton's title character (by the way I have no idea why the inverted commas are on the title card) as she hops between the beds of hunky farmhand Luke Evans, guy-liner wearing drummer Dominic Cooper and married novelist Roger Allam.

All the while the action is underlined and pushed along by the greek chorus of writers (beautifully introduced - "Lesbian Crime" indeed), resident at the retreat run by Allam's long-ssuffering wife Tamsin Greig and a pair of feckless teenagers who fantasize about Cooper's heartthrob band.

It is these sojourns into the lives of the other vilagers that provides the most delight in the film, the love life of Tamara being almost bland in comparison. Grieg plays the abandoned wife, toiling away in her farm kitchen, to perfection. No doubt honed after years of experience at the BBC radio soap "The Archers".

Both of the girls (Jessica Barden and Charlotte Christie) are also perfectly cast, carefully balancing that fine line between boredom and petty vandalism of youth without any indication of malice. The stand out though is Bill Camp (venerable US stage actor with too far too few film credits) as a Hardy biographer wrestling with writer's block and a shifting sense of self-confidence.

The witty banter between the characters is juicy enough to keep you interested, although the tendency to end each scene with a punchline, either comic or dramatic, is quite wearisome. This illustrates the difficulty in basing a film on a comic strip (I refuse to call it a graphic novel). Indeed you could probably watch one scene per day for a few weeks and get as much enjoyment. Some of the vignetttes are brilliant: see Tamsin Greig talking direct to the camera about her husbands infidelity, Jessica Barden's imagined tryst with Cooper and Camp and Evans arguing over the correct insult for Allam's philanderer.

I suppose the trouble with all this is that it doesn't really add up to much, the whole film feels like an extended sketch show. Even at the point that Tamara makes her final choice there's no real explantion why, not even a "she wins him back" scene, the storyline simply ends with an obvious inevitability which perhaps director Stephen Frears couldn't be bothered to explain. Saying that if I could choose between them I probably would have made the same decision - yum yum.

Overall I would say this is a lovely film to catch bits of, and I expect it to become a Saturday afternoon staple, but it fails to fully hand together.