Tamara Drewe (UK 2010)
The two teenage girls, the 'chorus', wait outside Tamara Drewe's house to see what's going on.
I'm not sure what I can say about Tamara Drewe except that I enjoyed every moment. But that's hardly surprising since I'm a fan of director Stephen Frears and the source material, Posy Simmonds' comic strip/graphic novel from 2005-7, is one of my fondest memories. The strip ran in the Guardian's Saturday Review section in 110 instalments (click on the image below – the whole thing is available online) and I didn't miss a week. The problem is, of course, that the film is being heavily promoted and released through mainstream multiplexes to audiences who have no knowledge of the strip. The result is a very mixed reception. Audiences under 40 have seemingly ignored the film and IMDB carries several outraged reviews. Interestingly, the film has done pretty well in France and I suspect that it might do well in some other territories where audiences might take it at face value as a bucolic comedy (though the ending – even though softened from the original – might be a shock).
Episode 5 of Tamara Drewe as it appeared in the Guardian
Perhaps the most useful thing I can do is to set it in context and try to explain to readers outside the UK its peculiar allure. Posy Simmonds has had a long career, much of it in the Guardian where she has maintained a gentle satire on the English middle-classes, holding a mirror up to the Guardian readership's sense of itself as well as taking down the more conservative readers of the UK's other broadsheets (and tabloids like the Daily Mail). During the 1980s Simmonds' vehicle for this was a strip about a London family with generally leftist/vaguely hippy politics known as the Webbers (possibly a joke about the sociologist Max Weber). Throughout the period of Thatcher's Britain the travails of the Webber clan offered a complement to the more vicious satire of the UK's greatest political cartoonist, Steve Bell. Between them, Posey and Steve kept many of us sane throughout those dark years. In 1999 Posy Simmonds produced Gemma Bovery which also ran in the Guardian. That novel, set in Normandy states its source inspiration in its title. Tamara Drewe as a title is less revealing but the film adaptation lays on enough clues to reveal that we are in the world of Thomas Hardy and his novel Far From the Madding Crowd – adapted as a John Schlesinger film in 1967 with Julie Christie as Bathsheba Everdene, the Tamara Drewe character. If you don't know the story, it concerns a young and very attractive woman who comes into property in a Wessex (Dorset) village and finds herself pursued by three men – a solid local farmer, a flash young blade (in the novel, a hussar, in the film a rock drummer) and an older married man. Valentine letters (emails) to the men create rather unfortunate circumstances. Simmonds' innovation is to provide a 'writers' retreat' in the village so that Hardy fan-writers, amongst others, can join the fun.
The screenwriter Moira Buffini has captured much of what was in Simmonds' satire, but either she or the producers have chickened out with the ending and overall I would have liked the darker and more 'Hardyesque' ending of the original. Some of the other, nuanced changes work much better. The 'Greek chorus' of the two teenagers who watch all the goings-on and interfere in the narrative are slightly younger than I had imagined from the strip, but work very well and are the best bit of the satire. I don't remember the American academic from the strip, so perhaps he is an invention. If so, it's a great idea. He is the balance for the two girls in the 'chorus' offering postmodernist comments about Hardy which I enjoyed. The trump trick for all those of us who are fans of the UK radio sitcom The Archers (now in its 60th year and possibly the longest-running sitcom of all) is the casting of Tamsin Greig in the movie as the long-suffering wife of the philandering novelist. She's there because she is one of UK stage and TV screen's greatest comedians, but for Archers fans she is always Debbie Aldridge and part of the upper middle-class of the farming community where she is a counterbalance to her evil father, Brian Aldridge, once über-villain and now mellowing paterfamilias. In fact it's a joy to see so much great acting talent in Tamara Drewe, including the wonderful Susan Wooldridge (Daphne Manners in The Jewel in the Crown) for once allowed into a feature film as a gun-toting cattle farmer.
Poor Stephen Frears, like Michael Winterbottom, seems to suffer from being too eclectic in his tastes and too willing to lose himself in his projects. For me, he has made some of the best British films of the last 40 years and although he doesn't give a good interview and promote himself as an auteur, he deserves recognition. Tamara Drewe isn't the UK film of the year, but it's certainly worth watching and thinking about.
Here's the best trailer – no annoying American voiceover and some nice graphics touches:
Posted in British Cinema
Tagged Melodrama, satire
Cambridge Film Festival #4: Rewers (The Reverse Poland 2009)
Sabine (Agata Buzek) and Bronislaw (Carson Daly) in Rewers
The last film that I saw at Cambridge deserves its own entry. Although I enjoyed all the films that I saw and found something interesting in each, none of the others particularly surprised me. Rewers was the exception. As the Sight and Sound writer Catherine Wheatley pointed out earlier in the day (see next blogpost), the best experience comes from entering a screening without any real expectation of what you are going to see. In this case, I had read the blurb, but then promptly forgotten it.
Rewers was the Polish entry for the 2010 Foreign Language Oscar. It is another of those Eastern European films exploring the communist period. We first see Sabine, a rather gawky young woman just turned thirty, with glasses in heavy frames and not very attractive clothes, in a cinema watching a newsreel celebrating Poland's young male athletes who are presented bare-chested in formation displays. Sabine is clearly excited by what she sees. The setting is Warsaw in 1952 when the Polish state is still very much under the thumb (boot?) of Stalin and the secret police are everywhere. Sabine works as a poetry editor in a state publishing house and she lives with her mother and grandmother in a comfortable flat in an old apartment block. Her brother, an artist, has an attic studio in the same block. Sabine's mother and grandmother come from the petit-bourgeoisie (they ran a chemist's shop before the war) are therefore suspect according to the prevailing ideology. Sabine's brother is reckless as an artist. She herself refers not having fought in the Warsaw uprising but confesses that she wishes she had. The various attitudes towards surveillance are effectively summed up when the family find an old gold coin with the inscription 'Liberté'. Gold is supposed to be handed in to the authorities, but Sabine insists on hiding it – by daily swallowing the coin!
The two older women work to find Sabine a husband. She is clearly keen for some sexual experience, but not with the unattractive men who her mother invites to the flat. One evening she meets Bronislaw, a dashing young man who saves her from a pair of thugs who accost her. He looks like the real deal – but things don't turn out as Sabine expects.
The Polish pressbook calls this film a 'comedy' and there are certainly comic moments, some of them not dissimilar to the social comedy moments in the Czech films of the 1960s. But it is dark comedy and it is played out in the context of the real social difficulties of living in a Stalinist state. From my point of view, I found the film fascinating and enjoyable because of the central characters and the interplay amongst the family members. I'm still not quite sure what the title refers to. In some ways 'Obverse' would be a better title if the intention is to present Sabine as a surprising character who turns out to be not what we expect. My lack of understanding probably explains why I didn't really appreciate the modern sequences in which we see an 80 year-old Sabine waiting at the airport. These didn't work for me, partly because the actors attempt to 'act' being old. This rarely works. I'm not suggesting that the acting performances are poor, but rather that when we have been watching the actors play close to their actual ages, we can see through the make-up and costumes to a younger person attempting to move slowly etc. On an aesthetic level, I much prefer the 1950s in the film, shot in beautiful black and white CinemaScope – whereas the 'present' is shot in murky colours and appears drab. As well as the wonderful cinematography, the music in the film is also important with jazz as the decadent Western music beloved of the intelligentsia and a tango providing one of the highlights of the film.
I've watched a few Polish films over the last few years and I'm struck with the frequent appearance of the national stereotype – Poles in movies drink themselves swiftly into oblivion. It happens so often that I feel it must be 'true'. It occurs again in this movie. Having said that I think that this is the best Polish movie I've seen for a while and it deserves to get a UK release – I hope someone has bought it.
A flavour of the film comes through the Polish trailer (no subtitles) but be warned it hints at spoilers for some of the surprises in the film.
Posted in East European Cinema, Festivals and Conferences, Polish Cinema
Tagged Cambridge Film Festival, communist society