A Flaubert fan’s obsession with a new neighbour comically explores the dangers of life imitating art
The trouble with classic works of literature that illuminate universal truths is that they also have an unerring habit of persuading us that life somehow fits neatly into the narrative parameters writers use to tell said stories. The chaotic nature of life, however, continually resists the set patterns of fiction, but that doesn’t prevent us from repeatedly going back to the stories we love in our quest to understand why reality doesn’t always square up to the things we imagine for ourselves.
In some respects, this is what Gemma Bovery is about – or, rather, it explores in gently comic ways the dangers inherent in trying to make life imitate art too closely. Riffing on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary by way of Posy Simmonds’s titular graphic novel, the film casts Gemma Arterton in the title role as a woman whose arrival in rural Normandy becomes a point of obsession for her new neighbour, Martin (Fabrice Luchini). Middle-aged, married and father to a teenage son who cares more about videogames than books, Martin’s love of tragic literature – and Flaubert in particular (he’s Normandy’s most famous literary son) – allows him to live in his head a little as a way of escaping – or at least trying to cope with – the drudgery of his own reluctantly artisanal life as the local baker.
When he first meets Gemma he’s instantly smitten and no wonder: newly arrived with her furniturerestorer husband (Jason Flemyng), she has a luminous presence, a smattering of French, and an array of clingy sundresses that will soon get him hot under the collar. Lest he come across as a foolish old man, though, he zeroes in on her name and convinces himself that his interest in her is purely protective: he doesn’t want Gemma Bovery to suffer the same fate as Flaubert’s doomed Emma Bovary. Stalking her from afar – and sometimes not so afar – he worries things won’t end well for her, particularly as she embarks on an affair with a handsome young law student (Niels Schneider). Martin witnesses the