Film Review: French take on Emma Bovary becomes English Gemma Bovery
Gemma Bovery is a clever retelling of the novel, Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert.
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Gemma Bovery
Directed by Anne Fontaine
Release Date May 28
Gemma Bovery is a clever retelling of the novel, Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert which tells the tale of a young woman, Emma Bovary living in the provinces, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.
The new film is also partly based on a graphic novel by French writer Posy Simmonds and is more episodic than the book with more simply etched characters.
Like the book, the film is relatively simple, concentrating on details and hidden patterns of everyday life. In the film an English women, Gemma Bovery (played by English actress Gemma Arterton) and her husband Charlie (Jason Flemyng move into a small French provincial town where she begins an affair with a young man. But rather than Gemma being the centre of the story as in the novel it is the minor character of Joubert (Fabrice Luchini) the local baker, who takes centre stage.
He is fascinated by the fact that she is a Bovery and that many of the Emma Bovary’s characteristics are displayed by this young woman including the fact that she has an affair.
Joubert becomes obsessed, not only with her relationship to Madame Bovary but also wants to prevent her from making the same mistake as his heroine of going into a downward moral and social spiral.
Gemma Arterton gives superb performance as the slightly naive Gemma as she brings together both twenty-first century and nineteenth century sensibilities around sexual dalliance. Fabrice Luchini, as both narrator and infatuated older man is strangely sympathetic as he creates his own insular comic and tragic world. It’s a great little film which should be seen before the release of a new Madame Bovary film starring Mia Wasikowska, Paul Giamatti and Rhys Ifans.
John Daly-Peoples
Fri, 22 May 2015
Fri, 22 May 2015
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Film Review: French take on Emma Bovary becomes English Gemma Bovery
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