Gemma Bovery (15.)
Directed by Anne Fontaine.
Starring Gemma Arterton, Fabrice Luchini, Jason Flemyng, Isabelle Candelier, Niels Schnieder and Edith Scob. English and French with subtitles. 99 mins
When life imitates art it rarely gets it right – it's more Mike Yarwood than Rory Bremner. Joubert, a baker in a small Normandy town (Luchini), get quite infatuated when a young English woman with a similar name to his literary heroine moves in opposite. As Gemma Bovery (Arterton) grows bored of her new life in the provinces and starts to cheat on her husband it is as if Flaubert is being re-enacted just for him, but nobody else is bothered by the parallels.
Bovery is also a case of Posy Simmonds film adaptations imitating Posy Simmonds film adaptation. Five years ago Arterton was strutting around the English country side in skimpy blue jeans shorts, the title character in a version of her graphic novel/ Guardian strip cartoon Tamara Drewe, that time echoing the plot of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. I think the French setting works better – the slightly preposterous caricatures sits more comfortably there. While Tamara Drewe needed lots of magic hour shots of sunrise and sunset to make it look special, Normandy looks great effortlessly and the production is boosted by a really strong cast.
Flemyng is touching as the cuckolded husband while Luchini is expert at involving the audience in his pathetic obsessions. It's Arterton's show though. She is perfect for this role because she has both classic beauty and earthy sexuality. She is, in ye olde FHM parlance, a high street honey: too-good-for-the-likes-of-you lovely and yet a bit common. So when the slightly pitiful Joubert projects his fantasies, both sexual and literary onto her, she embodies both his version and the real Gemma effortlessly.
Simmonds' work suggest that when life imitates art, it does it as farce rather than tragedy, or rather as polite gentle middlebrow social comedy. When Gemma final starts to read the Emma book she comments that nothing much happens, but it is interesting. I think I could spring for “interesting” as a description of this film but it is also kind of meandering, and takes an inordinate amount of time getting through its 99 minutes. What is it for? An epilogue suggests that maybe it was intended as much more comic than was put across.
Directed by Anne Fontaine.
Starring Gemma Arterton, Fabrice Luchini, Jason Flemyng, Isabelle Candelier, Niels Schnieder and Edith Scob. English and French with subtitles. 99 mins
When life imitates art it rarely gets it right – it's more Mike Yarwood than Rory Bremner. Joubert, a baker in a small Normandy town (Luchini), get quite infatuated when a young English woman with a similar name to his literary heroine moves in opposite. As Gemma Bovery (Arterton) grows bored of her new life in the provinces and starts to cheat on her husband it is as if Flaubert is being re-enacted just for him, but nobody else is bothered by the parallels.
Bovery is also a case of Posy Simmonds film adaptations imitating Posy Simmonds film adaptation. Five years ago Arterton was strutting around the English country side in skimpy blue jeans shorts, the title character in a version of her graphic novel/ Guardian strip cartoon Tamara Drewe, that time echoing the plot of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. I think the French setting works better – the slightly preposterous caricatures sits more comfortably there. While Tamara Drewe needed lots of magic hour shots of sunrise and sunset to make it look special, Normandy looks great effortlessly and the production is boosted by a really strong cast.
Flemyng is touching as the cuckolded husband while Luchini is expert at involving the audience in his pathetic obsessions. It's Arterton's show though. She is perfect for this role because she has both classic beauty and earthy sexuality. She is, in ye olde FHM parlance, a high street honey: too-good-for-the-likes-of-you lovely and yet a bit common. So when the slightly pitiful Joubert projects his fantasies, both sexual and literary onto her, she embodies both his version and the real Gemma effortlessly.
Simmonds' work suggest that when life imitates art, it does it as farce rather than tragedy, or rather as polite gentle middlebrow social comedy. When Gemma final starts to read the Emma book she comments that nothing much happens, but it is interesting. I think I could spring for “interesting” as a description of this film but it is also kind of meandering, and takes an inordinate amount of time getting through its 99 minutes. What is it for? An epilogue suggests that maybe it was intended as much more comic than was put across.
