Film notes and reviews » 2011/12 season » Tamara Drewe, August 2011

Tamara Drewe, August 2011

Tamara Drew shown August 2011 at the Cranleigh Film ClubUK 2010. Director Stephen Frears.

Certificate 15

This is a tale of literary folk in the country, and also country folk observing middle class urbanites’ follies and pretensions. Then we also have sharp commentary by the young on the supposedly mature. All this is set in lovely English countryside, in a typical sleepy village where a writer of popular thrillers and his wife run a retreat for aspiring writers whom the author can patronise whilst being adored (at least by the ladies). Into this scene arrives a professional columnist, Tamara Drewe, who grew up in the village as an ugly duckling but returns as anything but, to do up her old home, arouse lust and disrupt this bucolic spot.

Stephen Frears has again done his speciality thing of putting on screen what the writer really wrote, as for The Queen, Dirty Pretty Things, My Beautiful Launderette etc. This work will endure because it is a sublime antidote to all those TV and radio tales of country folk.