Tama­ra Drewe

The bucol­ic splen­dour of rur­al Dorset is under­cut by an off-key note of emo­tion­al vio­lence in Stephen Frears’ Tama­ra Drewe. Based on the com­ic strip by Guardian car­toon­ist Posy Sim­monds, it con­cerns the roman­tic mis­ad­ven­tures of Lon­don jour­nal­ist Tama­ra Drewe (Gem­ma Arter­ton), who is forced to return to the coun­try vil­lage of her roots after the death of her parents.

Her arrival in this insu­lar com­mu­ni­ty – strad­dling a fence in dar­ing­ly low cut den­im shorts – sets tongues wag­ging and hearts flut­ter­ing, as Tama­ra recon­nects with old flame Andy (Luke Evans) and lech­er­ous local nov­el­ist Nicholas Hardi­ment (Roger Allam).

What could have been a straight­for­ward tale of a past revis­it­ed and lost love regained swells grad­u­al­ly but inex­orably into some­thing both grander and more trag­ic. An assig­na­tion with a mas­cara-daubed rock star, and the jeal­ous atten­tion of two bored teenagers cat­a­pults the nar­ra­tive into uncer­tain ter­ri­to­ry, segue­ing from the gen­tle vibe of Eal­ing com­e­dy into the dark­er realm of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs.

Strip­ping away the daz­zling veneer of sun-dap­pled priv­i­lege, Frears reveals a world of betray­al, des­per­a­tion, bit­ter­ness and regret. Whether it’s Hardiment’s emo­tion­al­ly abu­sive behav­iour towards his cuck­old­ed wife; Andy’s soul­less rela­tion­ship with an itin­er­ant bar­maid; or an unex­pect­ed­ly graph­ic finale, Tama­ra Drewe ruth­less­ly inter­ro­gates the mid­dle-class mores of Lit­tle Eng­land, and find them wanting.

But there is a per­sis­tent prob­lem with the mate­r­i­al, and that is the char­ac­ter of Tama­ra her­self. This sup­pos­ed­ly high-fly­ing career woman spends the entire film flip-flop­ping from one man to the next, des­per­ate­ly seek­ing val­i­da­tion through sex. Her idea of inde­pen­dence is sim­ply to drop one unsuit­able lover for the next – not once does she appear hap­py or secure in her own skin.

Indeed, her pass­port into London’s media elite has noth­ing to do with any great tal­ent for jour­nal­ism, but rather a nose job that trans­formed an awk­ward coun­try girl into a sex­u­al­ly desir­able, and there­fore social­ly accept­able, young woman.

Per­haps Tama­ra is sim­ply there to expose the odi­ous behav­iour of the male char­ac­ters, but then why com­mit the nar­ra­tive own goal of focus­ing on a pas­sive cipher for near­ly two hours? And besides, it’s not just her. Hardiment’s wife Beth (Tam­sin Greig) finds her trag­ic sto­icism point­ed­ly under­mined by Andy’s dec­la­ra­tion that the poor woman ​‘needs a man’.

There’s cer­tain­ly noth­ing wrong with the per­for­mances. Gem­ma Arter­ton marks time between block­busters by doing some real act­ing, bring­ing an assured vital­i­ty to our ambigu­ous hero­ine. Luke Evans is all brood­ing mus­cu­lar­i­ty, while Roger Allam steals the show as the dia­bol­i­cal Hardiment.

It’s just that it’s dif­fi­cult to rec­on­cile the film’s fluc­tu­at­ing tones. At its best, Tama­ra Drewe encap­su­lates a sense of dead­en­ing small-town anomie. The ques­tion is how seri­ous­ly we are meant, or able, to take it.