Starring Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts. Rated PG.

In Dorset in 1870, the smile of a maiden is agreeable in itself. But if she’s an heiress, a roll-up-her-sleeves hard worker, and a protofeminist farm manager who assures her new, gobsmacked employees that “it is my intention to astonish you all,” a deluge of marriage proposals must certainly follow.

In this charming, agreeably compressed retelling of Thomas Hardy’s novel, Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan) is the vivacious heroine. She’s independent, smart, and fair, but a certain cluelessness about her own feelings is both her humanizing trait and the engine of plot.

Given the affections of three men—taciturn shepherd Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), dashing Sgt. Troy (Tom Sturridge), and upstanding gentleman Boldwood (Michael Sheen)—Everdene doesn’t juggle their attentions so much as bat at them awkwardly.

She is corseted by style and gender expectation, but Mulligan is dazzlingly free. Her performance is deft without being too showy.

For fans of showy, director Thomas Vinterberg serves up a lush colour palette, backlighting the actors in warm sunshine and happy thoughts. Schoenaerts is here muted, framed, and idealized into a fairy-tale hunkishness that might seem objectifying were you not meant to be carried away by the swooniness of the whole enterprise.