GEMMA ATHERTON, FABRICE LUCCHINI IN GEMMA BOVERY

Life imitating art, sort of, with Lucchini

Gemma Bovery is a French film that also works for Anglos, including the aging arthouse crowd Helen Mirren's recent films play to; it's sweet, mildly exotic, and unchallenging. The plot, based on the British graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, is thin and contrived, but the setting is an irresistibly beautiful part of the French countryside, and the female lead is a classy sex bomb. The filmmaker, Anne Fontaine, has also recruited some good actors, including Fabrice Lucchini, Kacey Mottet Klein, and Jason Flemyng, as well as Elsa Zylberstein and even the iconic Edith Scob. The contrivance is literary. Liberal arts graduates will recognize the names and so will movie buffs. Emma Bovary, the attractive, bored woman in Gustave Flaubert's famous novel whose adultery and debts lead to suicide, has been on the screen many times in many forms.

Martin Joubert (Fabrice Lucchini) introduces himself as we see him kneading a round loaf: seven years ago he moved back to Normandy from Paris to run the family bakery. He had decided that making bread was more worthwhile, and more soothing and Zen, than his previous twelve years of "stress" with a publisher annotating university thesis "that no one would ever read." And now, an English couple moves in next door to the Jouberts. Would you believe? Their name is Bovery. The name of the husband (Jason Flemyng) is Charles, just as in Flaubert's novel (which also takes place in Normandy). And his pretty wife (Gemma Atherton) is Gemma -- not quite Emma, but close. This is the beginning of a tale of imagined parallels between literature and life that promises to be literal-minded, and is. The resemblances between this young woman and Flaubert's tragic heroine may keep the plot flowing, but they don't run deep.

The Boverys are Brits, but the film winds up being dominated by its narrator/commentator Fabrice Lucchini, who tells the story in flashbacks. Lucchini, originally a protégé of Eric Rohmer, has become a huge personality in France, and lately is more familiar abroad through the good-natured comedies Potiche and The Women on the Sixth Floor, as well as Ozon's wickedly clever In the House (in the latter, not unrelatedly, he plays a writing teacher who is duped). Gemma is less elegantly literary than Lucchini's recent Bicycling with Molière, a film more truly crafted for him, but this one obviously has more crossover Anglo appeal. The actor-autodidact-personality has been getting a lot of work. When you factor in his long-running literary stage shows and his frequent TV appearances, you wonder if he's ever at home. Lucchini has always been hyper-articulate. Unfortunately, his character has too much to say in this movie. Martin's lengthy monologues overpower the essential but delicate drama of the young woman.

All we know about these English Boverys at first is that Gemma is pretty and young and Charles (Flemyng) obviously isn't. The introduction comes through dogs. Martin's brown mutt Gus runs off after the Boverys' fluffy white canine froufrou, called Carrington, and Martin runs over to recover Gus and apologize. He is stunned when he learns the couple's names: Flaubert's masterpiece has loomed large in his imagination ever since it blew him away at sixteen. Soon the links he imagines between these English Boverys and Flaubert's fated couple start seeming true. He also immediately becomes enamored with the pretty, superficial young Englishwoman. How sexy it is for him to watch Gemma mould big lumps of dough in his bakery, on a visit! Soon she helpfully faints into his arms from a bee sting while they're on a little walk. Her French grows in a single leap from hardly knowing any words in the first scene to an excellent grasp of idiom and a good accent a few scenes later. Murmuring the verbs Gemma has been conjugating, he says "J'aurais voulu tout ce qu'elle aurait voulu," "I would have wanted everything she would have wanted." The line doesn't really mean much, but in Lucchini's delivery, anything sounds good.

The plot is iffy, but the screenplay, by Jacque Rivette's writer Pascal Bonitzer, contains some wry satire, though not as much as in the source graphic novel. The other English chap in town, Rankin (Pip Torrens) is a condescending bore, and his French wife Wizzy (Zylberstein) is insufferable in either of the two languages. Martin's wife Valérie (Isabelle Candelier) is worn out and whiney. Gemma herself, not inappropriately, is a specialist in "faux" surfaces, and she too can spout tiresome decorator talk. She spouts some when she visits the chateau of the golden-locked young local nobleman and lazy law student, Hervé de Bresigny (Niels Schneider, the dreamboat in Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats), who becomes Gemma's seducer. Hervé is soft, poetic-looking, and wonderfully empty-headed and bland. His harsh-spoken mother (Edith Scob) justifiably treats him like a child. No wonder Martin's only real companion is Gus. He is horrified when he spies Gemma and Hervé's trysts -- which get a lot more graphic than anything in Flaubert. (The movie isn't very consistent in its treatment of point of view.) In the mixing up of Martin's literary imaginings and the film's "reality," a distinctly surreal note occasionally comes in. There's one striking night shot (with luminous sky) from afar where a couple dance in a chateau, right out of René Magritte. One wishes for more such touches, and some real surprise and danger, a dash of vintage Chabrol.

What we get isn't Chabrol, but Atherton's (and Schneider's) beauty, Lucchini's nice line readings, and Christophe Beaucarne's handsome photography of landscape and interiors. Needless to say, Gemma is nowhere near as complexly conceived a character as Flaubert's Emma Bovary. Anne Fontaine has proven a filmmaker of variable quality and uneven tone. Though her oddly rambling Dry Cleaning (1997) was intriguing, and her How I Killed My Father (2001) was strange and thought-provoking, she recently turned out the atrocious Adore (2013) and the trashy urban comedy My Worst Nightmare (2011). In between comes the so-so historical film Coco Before Chanel (2009) and the mediocre resort comedy of The Girl of Monaco (with Lucchini, 2008). There's nothing very consistent or very high quality in this filmography. But there is often something watchable, as here.

Gemma Bovery, 99 mins., debuted in August and September in Angoulême and Toronto (Gaument); French theatrical release 10 September 2014 (AlloCiné press rating 3.4, best rating of her films after How I Killed My Father, 3.8). Limited US theatrical release by Music Box 29 May 2015 (N. Calif., 5 June); UK, 7 August.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.