Nose job taken at face value in 'Tamara Drewe'

The nose job might not have changed the history of the world (see: Cleopatra), but it certainly alters the fortunes of "Tamara Drewe," whose titular heroine is liberated by rhinoplasty, much as its source material is liberated by director Stephen Frears. A thrice-distilled sex-romp comedy, the film is based on the graphic novel by Posey Simmonds, which, in turn, was inspired by Thomas Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd."

Tamara (played by onetime Bond Girl Gemma Arterton) returns to Wessex with a new nose (she was once called "Beaky") and consequent powers and confidence. She's a time bomb, and goes off amid her hometown's vaguely disreputable writer's colony, run by serial adulterer Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam) and his long-suffering wife, Beth (Tamsin Greig). Nicholas is drawn to Tamara like a housefly to an overripe honeydew melon and she's not unobliging. Add to the mix a local named Andy (Luke Evans), who has a few issues with Tamara, and a rock star named Ben (Dominic Cooper), who has a few issues with megalomania, and what Frears is up to is an adult comedy in which people know their minds and glands and things get messy, en route to being funny.

Frears has what one might call a mixed filmography - he directed "The Queen," "The Grifters" and "Dirty Pretty Things"; he also made "Cheri," "Mary Reilly" and "The Hi-Lo Country." Where "Tamara Drewe" falls in all this is somewhere short of royal but well beyond routine, and is accessible as a Frears film is likely to get.