Tamara Drewe by Stephen Frears

Every now and then a British filmmaker manages to make an infectious comedy that you wouldn’t mind seeing over and over again. After being incurably charmed by The Full Monty and Love Actually it was time for a new romantic comedy to make its way, without any particular reason, close to my heart.

Tamara Drewe, Stephen Frears’s adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name, takes us to the English countryside of Ewedown, to a place where all writers in search of inspiration can retreat: the Stonefield cottage, run by Nicholas and Beth Hardiment. Pretty soon, the town’s peaceful life is shaken up, not by a crazy, innovative idea produced by one of the hosted authors, nor by Beth’s discovery that her thriller-writing husband is cheating on her, but by the return of Tamara Drewe and her re-modelled nose. Having grown up there as a smart but rather ugly duckling, Tamara gives her former village a shock when she comes back to restore and sell her mother’s house, presenting herself with a modern femme fatale, media celebrity look. She is soon to discover however that cutting loose her connections with the past doesn’t go as easy as a nose-job, a lesson learned by the end of the film by almost everybody in her neighbourhood.

Despite the name, the film doesn’t only focus on Tamara Drewe, but actually follows the adventures of a series of different characters and their love quests. The protagonists act more stupidly than we might expect in most of the circumstances, which of course is the basic ingredient for comedy, but at the same time gives a flavour of realism which is surprising given the filmmaking style. Tamara, for instance, makes a whole chain of bad decisions regarding her personal life, which in most romantic comedies only happens once. She gives up, she doesn’t fight for her love, she’s insecure and thus closer to us than we would initially expect.

Although not serious enough to make it to the official competition, Tamara Drewe nonetheless proves that romantic comedies can mirror the problems of the modern society and that cinema doesn’t necessarily need to send us in a state of depression in order to make us reflect on them.

By Maria Diceanu