10/10
Author: Dr Jacques COULARDEAU from Olliergues, France
19 October 2010

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Stephen Frears has shot a marvelous comedy with this film. A social comedy for sure about rural England. A farm transformed into a guesthouse for writers and all it means to be able to write in the peace and quiet of the countryside with only the chirping of birds and the stampeding of cows around you.  And yet the village is big enough to have a nice pub and a few other fundamental entertainments of that type, but it's true nothing else. Then he adds the writers themselves. In fact two are standing out.

The husband of the farmer's wife is a detective thriller writer, which makes the farmer's wife a writer's wife and the farmer a writer, then who is the farmer? The second one that counts is the American university professor on a sabbatical to write a book on Thomas Hardy. The first one is unfaithful by principle and his wife is as blind as mole. The second one is unmarried and as shy as an old bat. The wife of whatever he is, farmer or writer, is blind for one and is naïve for two.

Then throw into that set of stiff quibbles, and we all know why the males are stiff, a young chick from the press, Fleet Street, on a mission with a brand new surgical nose and the whole little microcosm of this world explodes, especially when she brings a rock star in the picture with a dog that hates cows. You can imagine the stampeding of males at the door of the young woman, and of the little girls who want to touch the rock star, and of the cows in the fields. There will be some victims, essentially a man and a dog but I won't tell you which man and whose dog.

But it is hilarious because it is a case of perfect English slightly black humor, and blacker does not exist. To be Shakespearian only a few boys dressed as girls and vice versa are missing, and maybe a play in the play, like some puppets playing their own string and rod story. And everything ends well with the police and a burial, with some tears and some solace, with some peace after the battle and battles to come after the respite. Good job, Mr. Frears, and see you next time.