GEMMA BOVERY

Posy Simmonds is well known British cartoonist known for re-intrepreting classic literature in a modern setting in serial comic strips.  Her TAMARA DREWE, a version of Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd,  was adapted as a film in 2010 by Stephen Frears with mixed results. On the whole, I much preferred this Franco-English adaptation of Simmonds GEMMA BOVERY.  In this version of Flaubert's iconic tale of middle class married boredom, tragic love and debt, the heroine is played by Gemma Arterton (who also played Tamara Drewe).  Mrs Bovery has moved to a small town in northern France to live with her husband (Jason Flemyng), a humble decorator.  However, it soon becomes apparent that she has tastes of something grander and more sensuous.  She buys things that she can't afford on a whim, and there are hints of previous, richer lovers.  For no other reason than just to see what it's like, she cheats on her husband with the local nobleman, a rather pale imitation of the novel's Rodolphe.  

All this is observed by the town's baker, Martin Joubert (Fabrice Lucine - POTICHE).  He's a man obsessed with Flaubert's novel, attracted to Gemma, and almost willing her to re-enact the story, although not of course its ending.  The result is a wonderful performance of wry tragicomedy that sets the tone for this charming and sometimes deeply moving film.  I also love the wry social commentary that Simmonds is famous for. In this case, it's embodied in the Franco-English couple Rankin (Pip Torrens) and Wizzy (Elsa Zylberstein) - Notting Hill yuppies with a lavish second home in France. The movie perfectly satirises their social climbing and insecurity. The problem is the inevitable clash of tone, which director Anne Fontaine doesn't handle well, especially in the final act of the film. Maybe no-one could and the ultimate fault lies with Simmonds for shoe-horning in that ending....Either way this remains a charming and occasionally very clever movie, if flawed.

GEMMA BOVERY has a running time of 99 minutes and is rated R.  The movie played Toronto 2014 and was released last year in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Greece and Portugal. It was released earlier this year in Italy, Estonia, Hungary, Norway, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Turkey and Brazil. It is currently on release in the UK and Ireland.

COCO AVANT CHANEL / COCO BEFORE CHANEL - yawn

I am the target demographic for this film. A woman of a certain age with a penchant for period romance and a handbag collection worth the output of a small African country. Coco Chanel defines a large part of my wardrobe, shoes, handbags and cosmetics. More profoundly, I am a career woman, and Coco Chanel was not just a radical fashion designer but also a formidable businesswoman who founded a global brand.

Why, then, did I find this movie so dull? The problem is that COCO AVANT CHANEL wants to tell us how Coco got to Paris, rather than how, once in Paris, she built her global business. The film argues that to know Coco as a young woman is to know all - a highly reductive stance. So we see very little of Coco designing anything, or of her famous business sense. Rather, the film focuses on her struggle to break out of the role pre-WW1 France had ascribed to her: resigned to being a working class shop-girl, a bauble for rich men to be traded like property, trussed up in corsets and unable to breathe.

It's a shame that a woman as radical and, yes, politicised, as Coco didn't get a movie as brave as she was. Rather we get a rather schmaltzy period romance in which our poor young heroine foists herself upon a rich Milord, only to fall for a young English businessman who will marry for money. The whole thing is filmed beautifully, in sumptuous period settings, with a lush score from Alexandre Desplat. But Coco's spikiness is near-smothered by the sepia-tint. It's also deeply hypocritical for the movie to praise Coco's iconoclastic stance and her fierce independence, while, at the same time, reducing her life to one thwarted love affair.

Shame.

COCO AVANT CHANEL was released earlier this year in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Israel, Australia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Portugal and Poland. It is currently on release in the UK. It is released in August in New Zealand, Germany, Argentina, Singapore, South Korea and Norway. It is released in September in Japan, Sweden and the USA. It is released in October in Russia and Brazil; in November in Greece, Finland and Bulgaria and in December in Denmark.