Gemma Bovery (2014)
Directed by Anne Fontaine

Film Review

A mischievous riposte to Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence, Gemma Bovery started out as a comic strip in the British newspaper The Guardian, written by Posy Simmonds and intended as a satire on the English craze for living in France.  The tragicomic spoof of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary was then published as a graphic novel in 1999 before finding its way onto the big screen in this entertaining but pretty hollow adaptation by acclaimed French film director Anne Fontaine.   Making her French film debut as the lead heroine is the stunning English actress Gemma Arterton, who had previously starred in another screen adaptation of Simmonds' work, Tamara Drewe (2010), directed by Stephen Frears.

It is Arterton's hyper-sensual presence that gives Fontaine's film its characteristically Gallic eroticism but, strangely, her character is under-developed and feels almost incidental rather than central to the plot.  In Flaubert's novel, the characterisation of Emma Bovary is left unfinished, allowing the spectator to project whatever face he chooses onto the fatally flawed heroine, but in Fontaine's film she is hardly there at all, just an object of fascination for the men who fall under her spell.  Fontaine is far more concerned with the baker Martin Joubert, played by a strangely incongruous Fabrice Luchini, who is as convincing as a provincial boulanger as Liz Taylor would be as a one-legged cockney bag lady.

In what is alarmingly close to being an exact rerun of François Ozon's Dans la maison (2012), Luchini once again plays a man disillusioned with his profession who seeks escape in voyeuristic fantasies.  Luchini's overpowering charisma makes it hard for him not to be the centre of attention, but by allowing him to steal so much of the focus Fontaine completely alters the thrust and tone of Simmonds' story, to the extent that it ends up as verbose, stuttering farce centred around the male libido instead of a well-observed satire on the middle-class English obsession with all things French.

Fontaine scripted the film with Pascal Bonitzer, whose own films as a director have a tendency to be on the over-wordy side, often to the detriment of the plot.  Gemma Bovery is positively awash with superfluous dialogue and, with a less interesting and committed cast, would almost certainly have been a Grade-A yawn-a-thon.  Elsa Zylberstein, Edith Scob and Niels Schneider (whose Flaubert counterpart is readily discerned) all provide a welcome antidote to Luchini's stifling presence and help to prevent this from ending up as a one-man show.  By over-simplifying Simmonds' nuanced satire and radically shifting its focus, what Fontaine ends up delivering is a kind of Flaubert for Dummies, a crude but superficially likeable comedy-drama that does to a great work of French literature pretty much what the American military did to two Japanese cities in 1945, albeit with a little more panache and a somewhat lower body count.

Film Synopsis

Martin Joubert has given up his job with a Parisian publishing firm and now runs a thriving bakery in the Normandy village where he grew up.  His passion for great works of literature helps him to get through the mundanity of his present life.  Imagine then his excitement when an English couple, Gemma and Charles Bovery, take up residence in the house across the street.   Not only do these new arrivals have names that evoke Flaubert's most famous characters, they also appear to behave like them. Soon Martin's imagination is going into overdrive, but the attractive Gemma Bovery has never read Flaubert's book and wants only to live her own life...