when ews got out that Thomas Vinterberg was working on an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd, the pairing of author and director seemed too good to be true.
Vinterberg is the vinegary Dane who, in films like Festen and The Hunt, captured the chill of life so acutely that it made your heart twinge – and the story of a headstrong young woman buffeted by three rival suitors in south-west Victorian England seemed like the kind of jape he and Lars von Trier, his some-time collaborator, might have cooked up during a casual morning stroll across a blasted heath.