Gemma Bovery [DVD]

Very funny sexy film, Gemma as brilliant as always but the star by far is Fabrice Luchini a brilliant french actor with hangdog expression. Dont let the subtitles put you off just buy it and enjoy.

When an English couple move to a small French village, the local baker becomes obsessed with the fantasy that they are acting out Madame Bovary, a famous French novel. I wasn't familiar with the novel, but it made no difference to my enjoyment of the movie. The cast works well for all the characters, especially the comical baker and his eye-rolling wife, along with the wonderful Gemma Arterton. It's a fairly gentle tale told with a lot of charm in typical French fashion. Not for anyone who wants loads of action or a thrill ride but very enjoyable for those who like something with a bit more charm.

Only watched half of it because my rental time ran out! It was okay, a bit like a novel when the baker narrated the story. Certainly not a masterpiece. Won't rent it again to se the ending because it wasn't entertaining enough.

Madame Bovary was famously bored with everything, thus ennui became her undoing. Flaubert’s obvious point was to satirise the emptiness and banality of bourgeois middle-class existence, its people non-people, just commodities of the new capitalism. So if they were spiritually empty, this was because they sold their souls to commerce and commercialism. As such, a drug like sex was a palliative for the disaffected, a temporary haven of pleasure and oblivion. Physical abandon made Emma forget everything, including her dull, nondescript husband Charles, an apothecary. Twenty-first century Gemma Bovery is an equal of Flaubert’s creation: young, beautiful, empty, bored. She’s English, a new arrival in Normandy with her English husband Charlie. He doesn’t dispense tinctures, but he’s as dull as one who does. They come to France and their new village with high hopes, buying a rundown cottage at a cut-price rate. They aim to reinvent themselves, to become European, to speak French and learn more about wine, cheese and the other stereotypes that foreigners use to define the French. They are comic and tragic figures, though in their seriousness they can’t notice it. As they start to settle in and socialise the local French women gossip that Gemma is shallow and boring. It isn’t that her French is poor, though it is. It’s that there’s no there there behind the façade of beauty. Has her husband noticed? Perhaps not, distracted by the good sex. Or good back in Britain. Here in France Gemma can’t seem to properly settle in. So, unsettled, her gaze starts to wander and rove. Villages are the same everywhere. People live on top of each other. Everybody knows everybody else and the local sport is gossip. People see that Gemma is antsy. Perhaps they titter to themselves that she’s got ants in her pants. But ants won’t be the only things that enter them. She needs love, or the physical approximation of it. Charlie used to provide it, but now the thrill is gone. Frenchmen are the greater adventure: European, sophisticated, witty, worldly. And — critical point — romantic. The sweet nothings they whisper to women come like breathing to them, whereas Englishmen are always clumsy and ridiculous when they try. They can never pull it off, so their idea of romance, or a prelude to it, is getting sloshed at the pub. Not so with debonair French males. They don’t need to be blotto to love. Poetry is in their manner and language. They are born lovers. So, Gemma has come to the right place, a place that compounds the layers of irony for her husband. He thought they would start a new life in France. They do — just not the one he imagined and expected. What makes Gemma so shallow? Is it beauty and sex appeal? The same question haunted Flaubert about Emma. Had she been less attractive would she have been more interesting by having interesting interests? Is beauty the default setting for mentally lazy women? An unanswerable question of course, but we may ask it anyway because it intrigues us. At any rate, the shallowness can lead to no good. In fact, it will create complications that lead to the opposite. Frenchman Martin notices this. He’s a middle-aged, nosy neighbour and is star-struck by Gemma. He’s the local baker in the village, the man who watches the bread rise. That’s about the apogee of thrills in his daily life, so Gemma provides a distraction and attraction that interests him. In fantasy he’s her lover, though he knows he never can be in reality. So he vicariously gets off on the adulterous affairs Gemma will have with other, younger, more attractive males. Or perhaps “gets off” is the wrong expression. Jealousy is more like it, a jealousy that makes him feel alive again, a feat his wife and disaffected teenage son cannot provide. Until Gemma came along he was half dead, rotting in the village, the bakery, his home. She provides drama in an uneventful life. Who are the lovers Gemma takes on? I won’t breathe a word about them here. Much better to see the film. How does husband Charlie bear up? Not very well, as imagined. And Gemma’s fate? Not exactly that of Emma’s but similar. Women like this are a danger to themselves. This seems to be the comic, tragic, sexist verdict. They are the architects of their own demise. Martin is a reader. He is also imaginative. In Gemma he sees strains of Emma. He loved Emma as a teenager, devoured Flaubert. He wanted passion, romance, love in his life. Instead, he has flour and dough. He longs to hold Gemma in his arms, even knowing this increases the danger to her life and mental stability. Thus the paradox. Martin believes he is clairvoyant. It’s because he knows the novel so well in splendid detail. So when he sees, or thinks he sees, certain patterns from the novel repeating themselves in Gemma’s life, he is alarmed. What to do? In life, just as in literature, we can feel powerless, silent witnesses to actions we cannot influence. That’s the cleverness in the commentary of the film. It says there’s always overlap between life and art because just as one produces the other, each can influence the other in strange ways. Gemma is not an exact copy of Emma because the world has changed since Flaubert’s day. But human emotion has not changed, so Gemma can be seen as a facsimile of the original Emma. The final joke in the film is that another foreign couple moves into the village after the saga of English Charlie and Gemma. This couple is from Russia and rents or buys an empty cottage in the village. The woman’s name is Anna Karenina, a woman Martin begins to fall in love with from the very start. Is there a railway in the village? Pertinent question Tolstoy would have asked.

Posy Simmonds is one of the sharpest post-war satirists. Her weekly Guardian strips gave rise to a coterie of 'Islington privilege' and shabby chic characters which translated into her incredible comic-book novella. All of which are painfully funny. As someone who lived for many years in deepest rural France, every personality in this movie walked those streets and lanes that I did. This is a sharply funny yet poignantly true reflection of how geographical escapes do not always bring forth the realisation of a dream. A small and perfectly performed ensemble movie.

I was so glad Amazon had this film. It was recommended to me from a French learning site for both a great story and French that was relatively easy to understand ( some of the dialogue is in English as there are English characters but they also speak French like someone who is learning would ; ie it is relatively uncomplicated structures and vocabulary. I adore French language films and am so glad that Amazon carry quite a fews. I can honestly also say however that regardless of this, it is a great script and highly entertaining . I rented it but am even thinking to buy as it is something I could several times over.

This parody of Madame Bovary, based on the Posy Simmonds graphic novel, is sad, funny and wholly enjoyable. It's also an insightful commentary into British attitudes to the French and vice-versa.

Lovely film but it was French with Dutch subtitles I'm sure I ordered English subtitles it needs changing