Gemma Bovery is a modern-day refashioning of Gustave Flaubert’s literary masterpiece Madame Bovary, and while such refashionings can work well in some instances — Bridget Jones as Pride and Prejudice, for example, or West Side Story as Romeo and Juliet, if we want to go further back —this is not one of those instances. Instead, this is that other kind of instance; the one that desperately makes you wish they’d left well alone.
It’s based on the graphic novel by the writer-artist Posy Simmonds which, in turn, was based on her comic strip in the Guardian. It was the same with Tamara Drewe, Simmonds’s reworking of Thomas Hardy’s FarFrom the Madding Crowd, which was filmed in 2010, and also starred Gemma Arterton, and which was just as superficial and tiresome. (Advice for Ms Arterton: should someone come along with a project called, say, Hannah Karenina, just say ‘no’.) Here, Gemma plays Gemma, wife of Charles Bovery (Jason Flemying), a furniture restorer. They are English but, fed up of London, decide to relocate to a run-down cottage in the Normandy countryside. The story, such as it is, is told not through their eyes, but through those of a neighbour, Joubert (Fabrice Luchini), a doleful, middle-aged baker who loves classic literature and who becomes convinced that Gemma is tragically doomed; that Gemma’s story will duplicate the original Emma’s. He proceeds to watch her in a way that is meant to be amusingly harmless and fondly Maurice Chevalier-ish (but is, in fact, creepily stalkerish) while simultaneously developing the hots for her himself. Actually, scratch that. He doesn’t develop the hots for her. He is electrified from the off. And ogles from the off.
This is what I call ‘a Movie of the Panting Male Gaze’, which, considering it was written by a woman (Simmonds), and is directed by a woman (Anne Fontaine, Coco Before Chanel), is properly inexplicable, but there you are.
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