Gemma Bovery—Movie Review

by Peter J. O'Connell

Gemma Bovery. Released (USA): May 2015. Runtime: 99 mins. Rated: R for sexuality/nudity and language. 

Tragicomedy is a difficult genre to bring off successfully, Just the right degree of drollery has to be maintained throughout. Too much, and the work becomes silly. Too little, and it becomes sad. But when the amount is correctly calibrated, both brain and funny bone are stimulated. The French and British seem more adept at the genre than other nationalities.

The current film Gemma Bovery is a case in point. It has a French director, Anne Fontaine, but is based on a graphic novel by the British writer Posy Simmonds, who made her work a contemporary riff on the classic 1856 novel Madame Bovary by French author Gustave Flaubert. The cast is both French and British.

The plot of the film centers around Martin (Fabrice Luchini), a middle-aged, rather nerdy fellow who has moved back from Paris to a small town in Normandy to run his late father's bakery. Martin is very dedicated to his baking but is virtually obsessed with Flaubert's pioneering realistic novel about the tragic fate of an adultress, Emma Bovary, in a small town in Normandy.

Martin's bibliophilia almost consumes him when a British couple moves into the area. The couple's name is Bovery—and the beautiful wife's name is Gemma (played by Gemma Arterton!). Martin feels compelled to try to act as a kind of mentor to Gemma, encouraging her—without much success—to read the novel but avoid the pitfalls that beset Emma Bovary.

Eventually, pitfalls do beset Gemma, but they are given quite a different spin from those in Flaubert. In the meantime, we are served up a delightful cinematic sampling of French provincial life—walks in the countryside, the camaraderie of neighbors, mouthwatering repasts of bread, cheese and wine. (It is somewhat troubling, however, to learn that even French bakers now are making low-cal bread!)

The acting is delightful, too. Fabrice Luchini makes Martin by turns a man admirably concerned about the well-being of others and a meddling fool. And Gemma Arterton makes Gemma Bovery radiant in both physical beauty and personal appeal, but somewhat dim—though not dumb—when it comes to intellectual matters. The rest of the cast is of as high a quality as one of Martin's fine loaves of bread—and definitely not low-cal.

So Vive! and “Jolly-Good” to all the French and British folks directly or indirectly responsible for Gemma Bovery—from 1856 to the present. 

“Footnote” to the film: Posy Simmonds also wrote a contemporary riff on another classic novel, Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), about British provincial life. She changed the name of Hardy's heroine from Bathsheba Everdine to Tamara Drewe and gave that heroine's name to the novel. Tamara Drewe appeared as a film in 2010, starring—wait for it—Gemma Arterton as Tamara. And now an in-period version of Far From the Madding Crowd, with Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba, is playing in movie theaters at the same time as Gemma Bovery is circulating.