Culture

Directed by Stephen Frears. (3/5).

Tamara Drewe is pretty sweet. The story seems predictable, but then leads you on until you think it's all sussed before surprising you with something totally unpredictable. It is wonderfully silly and heart-warmingly sickening in the best possible way.
 

Dealing as the film does with numerous story lines, director Stephen Frears does a good job tying together various characters, sketching a comprehensive tale with multiple strands which weave together to create a film that is colourful and witty. The plot is quite hard to explain, purely because it is about how the arrival back of Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton) to her old hometown changes the lives of seven people drastically. But, in a nutshell; some people get together, some people break up, there's a cattle stampede and Beth (the long-suffering housewife of the film) stands in the sponge-cake mix.

 
Set in fictional Ewedown, a town in northern England, the people in this film have small-town syndrome. Everybody knows everybody and they're all tangled up in each other's lives. The setting is nice. I especially liked the rolling green hills, the cows and the accents. It's a mid-afternoon-with-a-cup-of-tea kind of film. Maybe not one you would want to take your grandmother to (there's sex! You don't see it, but the noises are noisy), but it's definitely first date material.
 

It has the most perfect depiction of a musician I have ever seen; Tamara’s love interest, Ben, is fantastic! The seduction of Tamara was probably one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. Freares is able to juggle all of the story lines and all of the action and still make the film coherent. It probably won't change your life, but it's a nice, self-contained film that encapsulates the trials and tribulations of people in rural England.
 

There’s also a great sense of community within the film. The actors and crew clearly had a lot fun making this film, and this comes through with vigour. The acting was a little off sometimes but overall this is a surprisingly satisfying,“feel good” film. It's definitely a “rom-com”, but probably the only one I've ever thought was actually any good. Forget Love Actually and Bridget Jones' Diary - Tamara Drewe beats them both.