GEMMA BOVERY
Los Angeles Premiere • Comedy, Romance • France, 2014
DCP • 2.35 • Dolby digital • Color • 99 min
Directed by: Anne Fontaine
Written by: Pascal Bonitzer, Anne Fontaine
Based on the original graphic novel by: Posy Simmonds
Cinematography: Christophe Beaucarne
Film Editing: Annette Dutertre
Original Score: Bruno Coulais
Produced by: Philippe Carcassone (Cine@), Matthieu Tarot (Albertine Productions), Sidonie Dumas (Gaumont)
Cast: Fabrice Luchini (Martin Joubert), Gemma Arterton (Gemma Bovery), Jason Flemyng (Charlie Bovery), Isabelle Candelier (Valérie)
International Sales: Gaumont
US Distributor: Music Box Films • musicboxfilms.com
US release date: May 29, 2015
Madame Bovary gets a light hearted modern makeover when Fabrice Luchini (Bicycling with Moliere – COLCOA 2013) brings his signature deadpan to Martin Joubert, a disillusioned Parisian executive who has retreated with his wife and son to the Normandy village of his youth. Martin takes over the family bakery, but he soon realizes that no man can live on bread alone. Relief for his boredom comes in the form of his new neighbors, Gemma and Charles Bovery. Gemma, played by the fetching Quantum Of Solace star Gemma Arterton, attracts Martin’s idle eye, and he is soon looking for excuses to observe her from afar, intrigued by the many ways her life appears to parallel her fictional counterpart. But Martin’s high-minded voyeurism turns to alarm when he becomes convinced that real-life Gemma is doomed to suffer the same tragic fate as Flaubert’s most famous character.
On the heels of Adore (2013), writer/director Anne Fontaine continues to explore sexual themes with this airy examination of passive objectification. Adapted to the screen in collaboration with the prolific writer Pascal Bonitzer, Gemma Bovery began as a Posy Simmonds comic strip satirizing the English craze for living in France. Fontaine first gained international recognition with the provocative Dry Cleaning (COLCOA 1998), and has since burnished a reputation creating complex, sexually ambiguous characters and acclaimed psychological dramas including How I Killed My Father (2002), Nathalie (COLCOA 2004), In His Hands (COLCOA 2006), and Coco Before Chanel (2009).
Quotes:
“Director Anne Fontaine finds every nuance of the absurd in Flaubert’s 1857 masterpiece via her cheeky update.”
- Katherine Monk POSTMEDIA NEWS KATHERINE MONK postmedia news
“It’s co-star Fabrice Luchini[…] who winds up stealing the show, providing an amusing portrait of a man whose dual obsession with Flaubert and the woman next door leads to no good.”
- Jordan Miztner HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
