Telluride Film Festival: Tamara Drewe

This being my first real serious film festival, I am learning a few things. One, you don't get up until the credits are almost done- bad form to do otherwise since the makers of the movie are probably in the room.
Second, there is something akin to what my husband calls "Buck Fever" a hunting term- I'll call it "Festival Fever" where you want to see everything there is to see and you desperately want to like it all- maybe there are other who have decided to be a critic and hate everything, but I am too nice of a person and since the people who made it are here, I want to like it, kind of feel bad if I don't.
But this is an Indie Festival which means there are some movies, way, way out there in social acceptability I mean and frankly Tamara Drewe is one of them.
Very British, with the flavor of The Calendar Girls in that it takes place in a country hamlet, the movie is actually based on a comic strip, excuse me- graphic serial, that ran very popular for a few years in England.

The story is center on a more sexy, voluptuous Tamara Drewe, with a new nose and new confidence returning to her home village after her mother's death. No less than three men are obsessed with her....helped by her tight clothes and red lipstick. Two of them had shunned the more plain big nosed Tamara in her youth, so she is basically out for revenge now.
I WANT to like this movie- I hadn't decided last night when I got out of the showing @ midnight and preceeded not to see a man hole and broken sidewalk in the dark and totally wiped out on the cobblestone walk and scrapped my knee up bad- see how I reveal way more then you want to know in this blog!!
But laying in bed not sleeping because my knee was literally pulsating and even the sheets made it sting more- I decide that really Tamara Drewe, which by the way stars Gemma Arterton, who was the brainy Bond Girl in the new franchises second installment- Quantum of Solstice and the princess in this summers The Prince of Pursia and is made by the same director, Stephen Frears, who brought us The Queen is really a movie that has very little redeeming quality.
First of all it is really an ensemble cast where the three men and one of the men's wives and two girls who hate Tamara and are obsessed with her rock star boyfriend have just as much if not more of a story them Tamara Drewe. You could say she is the catalyst that brings such drastic change to the sleepy isolated hamlet. But I still am not sure whose story this really was.
The role reversal when the men were fawning all over her literally new body was probably the most interesting, with her rejecting them. It was funny to here the dialogue of lies and desperation which around . But being the mother of two teenage girls the whole idea of leading with your body instead of your brains, the movie really turns my stomach in a way.
This movie would not score well with the Bechdel Test which is very simple but rarely passed in movies these days-
1. It has to have at least two women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man

This is a very very talky movie- but really, I think there might of been a scene with the daughter and mother talking about ...farm chickens- I can't remember- but most is not all was women talking to men or about men- or about hating the women who the men were obsessed with but I think that is an indirect fail.

Tamara Drewe

Release Date: October 8th 2010 in Theaters

Girl Test: Fails

"I won't be seeing it again, the real test!"