With Tamara Drew, Stephen Frears creates the perfect drama (review)

Gemma Arterton returns at 9 p.m. on France 4.

Tamara Drewethe adaptation of the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, returns to television this evening. What is this lovely success by Stephen Frears, worn by Gemma Arterton in 2010, about?

“With her redone nose, her endless legs, her job in the celebrity press, her aspirations for fame and her ease in breaking hearts, Tamara Drewe is the London Amazon of the 21st century. Her return to the village where her mother lived is a shock for the small community which thrives there in peace. Men and women, bobos and rural people, author of best-sellers, frustrated academic, rock star on a date or son of the country, all are attracted by Tamara whose pyromaniac beauty and ramblings lovers awaken obscure passions and will provoke a chain of circumstances as absurd as they are poignant.”

First had really appreciated Tamara Drewe at its output. Here is our review.

In this delicious, sentimental game of bowling which evokes the best charities of Woody Allen, the director dares everything. Populated by characters with barely forced features and portrayed by the cream of British actors, the film takes all the turns – dramatic or comic, sexy or intellectual, sentimental or trashy – without ever losing sight of the road.

With irresistible charm, Frears pulls off the perfect “drama” (the alliance of drama and comedy). Better: by drawing on the sources of Anglo-Saxon culture (PG Wodehouse, David Lodge, Thomas Hardy) and dipping it in a pop bath, he creates a frivolous comedy which is also a treatise on human passions. It’s funny, ironic and sometimes downright vulgar, but the way in which melancholy and crudeness disrupt the established comic order remains the film’s main tour de force. All the characters seem destined to become the opposite of what they appear, say or believe they are. All are condemned to experience dissatisfaction, both in their frustrated desires and in their realized desires. A light and serious film of which only Frears has the secret.

Gemma Arterton: “Gemma Bovery is very different from Tamara Drewe”