Frears makes a comic book movie

With all the brouhaha about the dissolution of the UKFC, it is great to see it go out in style with a uniquely British film that avoids all the usual clichés of British cinema: period pieces, gritty urban dramas, mockney gangsters or flaccid rom-coms.

Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe highlights all the things that Britain is really good at: literature, rock music, xenophobic country living, repressed emotions and sexuality, and adultery. It is co-produced by that great British institution that is the BBC, utilising some of the country's best writing and filmmaking talent.

The film is based on serialised comic strip, or sequential art if you want to be a pit posher, by Posy Simmonds that appeared in The Guardian (and later in book/graphic novel form), which was in turn based on Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. In this updated version of the story, the titular Tamara (Arterton) is a successful celebrity journalist who returns, transformed, to the Dorset village where she grew up as a dorky teenager. The main attraction of the village, apart from the recently returned prodigal daughter, is a writers' retreat held on the farmhouse of serial philanderer and renowned crime writer Nicholas Hardiment (Allam), and his long-suffering wife Beth (Greig). The main focus of the film is Tamara's antics with a visiting rock star (Cooper), who also happens to attract the attention of two wayward teenage fan-girls from the village, who are not only pivotal characters in the story's unfolding but also the best ones in the film. Also in Drewe's love quadrangle is Andy Cobb ( Evans), who is a gardener on the Hardiment's farm, and looks like he has stepped straight out of a Hardy or Lawrence novel. In a nice nod to the original material, one of the writers at the retreat is a frustrated American academic (Camp) trying to write a definitive study of Hardy, and becomes inspired by Beth. And so it goes on like a complicated episode of a rural soap opera.

While it could easily slip into farce, under Frears' skilled guidance it becomes a very smart, funny and well-observed look at the social mores of the British without falling into glaring stereotypes. All the characters are perfectly cast, and although they aren't totally realistic they are completely believable.

This is a gem of a movie and proves that it is possible to make a truly British film without relying on tired old genres or deliberately trying to pander to overseas markets.