BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

Her head filled with romantic fantasies and bored to death with her plodding husband, the heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s great nineteenth century novel “Emma Bovary” comes to a ruinous end. Her near-namesake in the witty French mashup “Gemma Bovery” is quite a different gal, but her life seems to be following the same treacherous path. At least, so it seems to her neighbor Martin Joubert, the local baker and Flaubert fanatic.

Director and co-writer Anne Fontaine adapted the film with Pascal Bonitzer not from the original novel but from the graphic update by Posy Simmonds. Fontaine has given Gemma a feminist spin; as played by the gorgeous Gemma Arterton (“Quantum of Solace”), Gemma Bovery is not so much swept away by her romantic musings as she is quick to act on her erotic urges. The dreamy romantic in this film is Joubert, who is as bored with his own married life as Flaubert’s heroine was with hers. The marvelous French comic actor Fabrice Luchini’s hangdog face is a wonderful barometer of his obsession with his new English neighbor. At first, he is intoxicated with her sensual beauty, but when she begins an affair with Herve de Bressigny, the dull son of local landed gentry, he becomes convinced that she will eventually kill herself, just as Emma did.

Joubert provides the voiceover narration of Gemma’s story after he snitches some of her journals out of her house. He doesn’t really need the journals since he follows her about from the time she and her furniture restorer husband Charlie (Jason Flemyng, “X-Men”) arrive to move into the tumbledown cottage across the road. Joubert shows Gemma how to knead bread dough, gently corrects her French, and scolds her about her hysteria over the field mice in the house. He and his dog Gus follow her in his bread truck when she stops for an assignation at the 14th century castle of Herve’s family.

At one of those dinner parties that always show up in French movies, Martin voices disapproval of all these English capitalists who have bought property in Normandy because they like French food and wine. He is just as irritated as those New Yorkers who fume over the foreign millionaires who have made Manhattan unaffordable. They are ruining the neighborhood. Still, he can’t get enough of Gemma who seems more down to earth and certainly more earthy than her obnoxious compatriots.

Normandy looks lovely on the screen, and you can almost smell and taste the bread Martin takes out of his oven. Luchini’s performance is the highlight of the movie; just to watch the adoration quickly followed by horror cross his face gives the film the emotion so deliberately missing in Flaubert’s novel. “You don’t care. You’re completely detached,” Martin complains to his dog Gus. Once he convinces Gemma to read the novel, she reports that nothing really happens but the book is interesting just the same. Exactly, Martin responds with delight. Nothing much happens in “Gemma Bovery” either, but it’s a pleasant diversion from the summer’s film menu of comic book characters and special effects.