Gemma Bovery

Synopsis: After leaving Paris, Martin Joubert (Fabrice Luchini) moves back to the Normandy village of his youth to take over the family bakery with his wife (Isabelle Candelier) and teenage son (Kacey Mottet Klein). One day a newly married English couple, Charles(Jason Flemyng) and Gemma Bovery (Gemma Arterton), moves into the house across the street. Martin immediately falls for the beautiful Gemma, not least of all because of her uncanny connection with most famous of all French literary heroines.  

You can pretty much group French films into two main categories: la vie parisienne and la vie à la campagne.  Each has their well worn characteristics, the Left Bank, le métro and les liaisons dangereuses on the one hand, rusticated villas, picture postcard scenery and les liaisons melancoliques on the other.  Anne Fontaine’s film falls squarely in the latter group.  Like last year’s Folies Begère it is a film skillfully crafted to please mainstream arthouse audiences although those more demanding will find it skirting dangerously close to cliché.

There are however things to recommend. The life-imitating-art concept is a beguiling one although I assume most of the credit for this goes to Posy Simmonds’ popular graphic novel which is its source rather than Ms Fontaine’s script, co-written with Pascal Bonitzer; Gemma Arterton looks breathtakingly gorgeous; a perfectly cast Fabrice Luchini is wonderful as the archetypical middle-aged Frenchman happier in his romantic fantasies than in his day-to-day life; and Fontaine who directed last year’s bold New South Wales-set film, Adoration, puts it all across with characteristic visual accomplishment.

Yet whilst no-one could object to the quality of the film, Fontaine’s failure to step outside the conventions of this style of cosy divertissement leaves one wanting more of Flaubert’s original heroine. Somewhat surprisingly, much like the Liv Tyler character in Bertolucci’s 1996 film, Stealing Beauty, Gemma remains throughout the film the object of male desire and bears little resemblance to Flaubert's tragically feckless heroine other than in Martin's imagination. This is not itself a problem but Fontaine does nothing to satisfyingly reinvent the character in a modern setting. Gemma’s deception of her husband is too easily brought on, her dalliance with a former lover too readily accepted and the film’s ending altogether too neat (although an amusing coda quickly makes one forget that). Instead, Fontaine gives us lots of picturesque plein air walks, visits to Martin's boulangerie (the scene of Gemma kneading dough in Martin’s kitchen is the film’s erotic highlight) and  encounters with frankly annoying (Elsa Zylberstein is particularly so) neighbours. The delectable Gemma simply drifts across the surface of it all.

Very much in the mainstream manner, Gemma Bovery is charming and amusing fare but I’m sure most people who see it will be seeking out Flaubert’s original novel to experience what Fontaine's film has deprived us of. And that is not such a bad thing.

FYI: Arterton starred in Stephen Frear's Tamara Drewe (2010), a not dissimilar but more effectively told story of rural infidelity also based on a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, this time reworking Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel, "Far From The Madding Crowd".

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