(France, 99
min.)
Dir. Anne
Fontaine, Writ. Anne Fontaine, Pascal Bonitzer
Starring: Gemma Arterton, Fabrice Luchini, Jason Flemyng,
Niels Schneider, Isabelle Candelier, Edith Scob, Elsa Zlyberstein.
 |
| Gemma Arterton and Fabrice Luchini © Jérôme Prébois / Albertine Productions |
Ah, books. Isn’t nice to relish a classic work of literature
and see the delicately crafted words fuse art and life? A great book lives on
the mind of the reader, and the legacy of a masterwork couldn’t be more evident
than in Anne Fontaine’s Gemma Bovery
as bookworm baker Martin Joubert (played by In the House’s Fabrice Luchini) watches art imitate life in his quaint country
town in Normandy. Joubert, endlessly enjoying flights of the imagination to
escape the boredom of his humdrum life, finds himself in luck when some new
neighbours move in across the street and the wife (Gemma Arterton) goes by the
name of Gemma Bovery. Normandy, as Joubert explains, is where Flaubert wrote
his literary landmark Madame Bovary,
so the potential that a real life Emma Bovary lives nearby lands Joubert in the
midst of a juicy page-turner.
Joubert’s boredom fuels Gemma’s distractions and vice versa as the droll Frenchman works his way into Gemma’s life by walking with her in the countryside, teaching her about bread and wine, and helping her with her French. This curious young Londoner—so seemingly foreign in provincial France—is just the right spice that Joubert needs for all his ethereal musings. He makes Gemma in his own sexual fantasy as he watches her alleviate her boredom with the help of a strapping young Frenchman (Niels Schneider), and his French lessons with Gemma carry a marked tone of innuendo, although Gemma is completely oblivious to his allusions and awkward stares. A saucy breadmaking session, for example, is so sexually charged that Gemma and Joubert might as well be making peach pie with Kate Winslet (or even discussing Madame Bovary in a book club with Kate Winslet) and Gemma stands in a long line of bored housewives longing for an escape.
It’s hard to say whether Gemma is as tired in Normandy as
Emma is, but Joubert imagines it so as he narrates his droll musings for the
audience. Fontaine drenches Gemma Bovery
in literary asides just as much as she delights in the natural beauty of the
Norman landscape: one doesn’t need to have read Flaubert to appreciate the play
on adaptation and the layers of intertextuality that run throughout the film.
(The film itself is an adaptation of Posy Simmonds that adapts Flaubert.) Gemma Bovery offers a literary kind of
love as Joubert sees parallels between Gemma and Emma, and tries to play
Flaubert by injecting himself into the complicated love triangles with his
buttery croissants and French cultural capital. He even prides himself as a
great artist in one especially fun scene in which he play directs Gemma’s
infidelity, but his own knack for tragedy triggers Gemma Bovery’s tragic
end. Dommage!
Joubert is a delightfully masterful voyeur and Luchini's turn demands to be seen by fans of 2013’s In the House, which also sees the French actor carry a playfully
literate tale about the perverse thrill of storytelling. He’s fun, spirited, just
a bit pervy with Joubert’s dirty-old-man vibe and a bit of a hipster with his
obsessions over Flaubert and fromage.
Luchini’s presence and the many asides of Gemma
Bovery inevitably soften the film with its likeness to the deliciously
superior In the House, but whereas
François Ozon’s film has a darkly satirical edge to its portrait of banal
suburban living, Fontaine finds a bright breeziness for the air of tragedy that
flows throughout Gemma Bovery. Gemma Bovery, however, sometimes feels
as lightweight as the delectable loaves of white bread coming out of Joubert’s
oven, but it’s fleetingly scrumptious as a dose of bookish carbs. (Nom, nom,
nom!)
The film’s opening frame and the ghost of Emma Bovary,
however, heighten the viewer’s awareness that Joubert’s ruminations don’t end
with a tale of happily-ever-after. Ever loaf of bread, after all, has its
crusts.
The tears that stain Gemma’s diary, which Joubert reads on
the sly throughout the film, show that Gemma’s story is peppered with Emma
Bovary-ish malaise despite the cheerful air she puts on for show. Arterton is
bright and fetching as Gemma, for her performance consistently balances the
edge of contentment and melancholy on which Madame Bovery teeters. She finds
joy in earthly sensual things, like sex and a good French loaf, but other she
seems just as bored at social gatherings as she does looking at the rain. Arterton
never fully gives Gemma in to Madame
Bovary’s literary ghost and instead lets the desolate housewife be Joubert’s
fiction while Gemma, the real Gemma, is a decidedly contemporary woman
struggling to reconcile her balance of work, love, commitment, and happiness.
It’s a nice reading on the character in a film filled with layers of
re-readings.
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
