TAMARA DREWE

Monday, January 24

Cast: Gemma Arterton, Dominic Cooper, Roger Allam, Luke Evans, Tamsin Greig, Jessica Barden and Charlotte Christie
Run Time: 111 minutes
Country: United Kingdom
Year: 2010
Language: English
Rating: PG (Coarse language, sexually suggestive scenes)

Based on Posy Simmonds' graphic novel of the same name (which was itself inspired by Thomas Hardy's classic Far From the Madding Crowd), this wittily modern take on the romantic English pastoral is a far cry from Hardy's Wessex. A Special Presentation at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival®, Tamara Drewe's present-day English countryside is stocked with pompous writers, rich weekenders from London, bourgeois bohemians, a randy rock star and a great many Buff Orpington chickens and Belted Galloway cows, and is a much funnier place.

When Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, Quantum of Solace) sashays back to the bucolic village of her youth, life for the locals is thrown tail over tea kettle. Tamara, once an ugly duckling, has been transformed into a devastating beauty (with a little help from plastic surgery). As infatuations, jealousies, love affairs and career ambitions collide among the inhabitants of the neighbouring farmsteads, Tamara sets a contemporary comedy of manners into play, using the oldest magic around, sex appeal.

The film takes the urban notion of the countryside and its people and turns it on its ear. Rather than the simple villagers and farmers we all imagine with unlocked doors, and a ready-to-please attitude, director Stephen Frears (Mrs. Henderson Presents, The Queen) has created a countryside rife with heady emotions, salacious gossip, jealousy and marauding cows. Cinematographer Ben Davis has ensured the picture looks stunning regardless of what absurdities we are seeing in front of us, and Frears is at the top of his game at the picture's helm.

Tamara Drewe is superbly entertaining and Frears never lets us up, walloping us with continuous absurdity time and time again. It has been said that he may have succeeded in creating a new genre with this project: the contemporary English Pastoral. Whatever the case, the fun is fast and furious in this hip and very precisely crafted black comedy.

"Adapted from a comic strip-turned-graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, which was itself based on Thomas Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd," picture represents a satirical but soft-biting swipe at contemporary middle-class mores among Blighty's chattering countryside classes."
- Leslie Felperin, Variety

Reviews: www.metacritic.com/movie/tamara-drewe

Official Site: www.sonyclassics.com/tamaradrewe

Winter/Spring 2011 Film Schedule January 10 - The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest January 24 - Tamara Drewe February 7 - Inside Job February 21 - Oliver Sherman March 28 - Another Year