Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7.5/10

Cast: Fabrice Luchini, Gemma Arterton, Jason Flemyng, Isabelle Candelier, Niels Schneider, Mel Raido, Elsa Zylberstein, Pip Torrens, Kacey Mottet Klein, Edith Scob, Philippe Uchan, Pascale Arbillot, Marie-Bénédicte Roy, Christian Sinniger, Pierre Alloggia, Patrice Le Mehauté, Gaspard Beaucarne, Marianne Viville.

An obsession with books is not a bad thing, in fact it nearly always leads to enlightenment and knowledge; sometimes though it can lead to living the life of the modern day and the real as if you conducting a performance, especially when people you know exhibit all the signs of a classic book.

Gemma Bovery not only shares part of her name with French writer Gustave Flaubert’ s literary heroine Madame Bovery, but her actions when she moves in with her husband Charles into a run-down French cottage in Normandy, also border upon the two worlds merging and being coalesced into one. It is in the eyes of neighbour and classic novel lover Martin Joubert to which these actions are most vivid.

Whilst not being a house-hold name in the U.K., it should be easy to see why Fabrice Luchini is much sought after in his native France. His almost effortless guile and stylistic panache in the role of baker Martin Joubert and the narrator of the tale played out before the cinema audience is something of a revelation. His time on screen is never wasted, it is something of a mystery of acting that even the most supposed simplest of scenes, such a person of repute can stand out as if they performing the technical aspects of Shakespeare.

With Gemma Arterton enjoying the camera’s attention in the role of Gemma Bovrey in an almost liquid dreamy sense that really catches the audience’s attention and Niels Scheider revelling in the limelight as the squire of the small village Hervé de Bressigny, Gemma Bovery is a film which actually goes beyond its expectation and lives up to the ideals of French Cinema that has been set out in the last couple of years. It is shamefully enjoyable to the point where even though nothing truly happens, art mirroring literature perfectly it seems, life depends on the choices made.

A film of the pastoral, where the city tries to tame the countryside but in which is left bruised by the experience of tussling with nature and the natural, Gemma Bovery is a very brave film that has to be admired for all the right reasons.

Ian D. Hall