Butler's Cinema Scene

Gemma Arterton and Fabrice Luchini

“GEMMA BOVARY” My rating: C+  (Opening June 12 at the Tivoli)

99 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Going in, the logical assumption is that Anne Fontaine’s “Gemma Bovary” is a present-day updating of Flaubert’s classic Madame Bovary (a straight cinematic adaptation opens today at the Cinetopia).

Actually, it’s more complicated and ambitious than that.  Perhaps too ambitious for its own good.

The story is told through the narration of Martin (Fabrice Luchini), the sixty-ish baker in a rural Normandy burg. He tells us that he used to be a literary editor in Paris, but gave it up for an uncomplicated life in the sticks.

Now he’s bored silly.

So he takes special interest when he discovers that his new neighbors, a young English couple, are named Charles and Gemma  Bovary (Jason Flemyng, Gemma Arterton). Quelle coincidence…the newcomers have almost exactly the same names as Flaubert’s characters.

Fascinated and not a little turned on by his pretty new neighbor, Martin befriends the Bovarys (Charles restores antiques, Gemma is an interior decorator specializing in trompe l’oeil) and begins actively studying (or spying on) them.

When he realizes that Gemma — going a bit stir crazy with rural life — has turned to a young law student (Niels Schneider) for a torrid affair, Martin smells a looming disaster. He moves surreptitiously to nip the illicit romance in the bud.

But good deeds can have unforeseen and disastrous consequences.

The script by Fontaine and Pascal Bonitzer plucks some ideas and motifs from Madame Bovary and cleverly works them into the yarn (like the bag of arsenic Gemma keeps on hand to control the mice problem in her aging farmhouse).

At the same time they pretty much ignore one of Flaubert’s big themes, in which his heroine is so bent on self gratification and a consumer lifestyle that she plunges into an ever-deepening debt.  In the era of Visa and Mastercard you’d think “Gemma Bovary” would be all over that idea, but we have to make do with a second young couple of  yuppies who spend like it’s going out of style.

The big  failure with “Gemma Bovary” is one of tone. There are moments when the film seems to be flirting with satire (particularly in Martin’s Woody Allen-ish obsession with Gemma), but it’s all played so straight and low-keyed that the humor barely registers.

Nor despite a downbeat ending does the film qualify as tragedy…perhaps because like Martin we’re standing on the outside observing. We never really get inside Gemma’s head and there’s very little emotional connection with the characters.

And then there’s the sad fact that in 2015 the infidelity of a bored young wife isn’t the eyebrow-raising affront to popular morality it was in Flaubert’s day. It’s more like business as usual.

The film looks great; the performances are solid if too somber. But the titillation offered by “Gemma Bovary” is all intellectual.

| Robert W. Butler