Gem­ma Bovery

In a post­card-pret­ty Nor­mandy vil­lage cap­tured with a lens can­ni­ly in thrall to that breezi­ly quaint French lifestyle, an amus­ing lit­er­ary twist is being spun. Fab­rice Luchi­ni plays a role that is the roman­tic flip-side to his cyn­i­cal­ly-dri­ven Eng­lish pro­fes­sor in François Ozon’s In The House. There­in, he encour­aged a pupil to embed with a fam­i­ly in order to write about their per­son­al life. In Gem­ma Bovery, his Mar­tin Jou­bert is a Parisian-teacher-turned-provin­cial-bak­er who becomes obsessed with a mar­ried Eng­lish­woman because she has (almost) the same name as Gus­tave Flaubert’s unhap­py heroine.

Gem­ma Arter­ton plays Gem­ma Bovery who has upped sticks from Lon­don with her hus­band Charles (Jason Fle­myng) and absent­ly befriends her besot­ted neigh­bour. ​“In one sec­ond that mean­ing­less lit­tle wave sig­nalled the end of 10 years of sex­u­al tran­quil­i­ty,” goes Luchini’s nar­ra­tion in that com­i­cal­ly over­wrought but touch­ing way the French actor has per­fect­ed over the years. Arter­ton is shot by direc­tor Anne Fontaine via Martin’s hyp­no­tised gaze. The sun bounces off floaty dress­es that cling to her body. Arter­ton gives a very ground­ed per­for­mance that is the antithe­sis to the airy-fairy tor­tured roman­tic hero­ine that Mar­tin is so des­per­ate to cast her as. In the gap between real­i­ty and his wild fan­tasies lies the comedy.

Absurd com­e­dy is ratch­eted up a lev­el when Gem­ma begins fol­low­ing a vague­ly sim­i­lar arc to her lit­er­ary fore­bear. The inde­cent­ly gold­en Niels Schnei­der slinks onto the scene as the cas­tle-inhab­it­ing, aris­to­crat­i­cal­ly-named, Hervé de Bres­signy. This is all the evi­dence that Mar­tin needs to ful­ly believe that fic­tion is com­ing to life. His acer­bic wife makes digs aplen­ty but only the audi­ence can hear her. Fontaine is ruth­less in the appli­ca­tion of the phi­los­o­phy that when a man sucks on a lit­er­ary love heart, noth­ing short of a tragedy will choke it loose.