Contemporary riff on Far from the Madding Crowd, a sex romp of above-average intelligence and in full-blooded color, set knowingly (or if you must, self-consciously) in Hardy country, at and around a writers’ colony in Dorset, where it seems a bit thick of the visiting American Hardy scholar not to remark on the parallels. The title character is a decamped local (Gemma Arterton, once the lead actress in a miniseries of Tess of the D’Urbervilles for British television) who now returns — oh very well, the return of the native — with a nose job, a pair of short shorts, and a swing in her gait, and who proceeds to toy with the affections of three men, the honest hunky horticulturalist she has known since girlhood (Luke Evans), the middle-aged and very married detective novelist (Roger Allam), and the heavily eyelined rock drummer who has just quit his band on tour in the area (Dominic Cooper). The motivations and indeed the entire personality of the central figure, a would-be novelist herself, are fuzzy in the extreme, and she, along with everyone else, gets upstaged by two snooping, pot-stirring teenage girls (Jessica Barden, Charlotte Christie) whose heads are permanently in the clouds but whose minds are paradoxically in the gutter: “He’s not even a proper celeb,” sniffs the chief instigator when the heroine takes up with the worldwide best-selling author. To put it another way: the pretensions of the arty folk supply ample fun, gentle fun (sample detail: the skull-and-crossbones on the collar of the rocker’s dog), but it’s the aspirations of the adolescents, low as they appallingly are, that put some teeth in the fun, some pain, some horror. With Tamsin Greig and Bill Camp; directed by Stephen Frears. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd