Day 157: Gemma Bovery (August, 13)

Sometimes, a comment makes a movie. 

I'll explain telling how I've heard about Gemma Bovery: yesterday, a good dear friend from other city was spending three hours here in Brasilia between flights. We meet, ate pizza, and we talked non stop. Among the most recent news in our lives, we talked a bit about films, as always. She told me about Gemma Bovery in such an endearing way that I could not postpone seeing it in the cinema for long. So today I was there, in a movie theater, after 23 days of forced abstinence. 

The movie was nice, but couldn't live up to her narrative. I immediately remembered when I told my sister about a Brazilian movie that I'd liked a lot when I was 15. She laughed with my retelling, but couldn't  enjoy the movie in the same way. There's something about someone narrating a film that had touched them that is in fact unique. Movies are made of their viewers comments too, and this film today especially my friend's story. 

A guy loves literature so much, and Flaubert in this case, that he projects Madame Bovary's tragedy to his neighbors with a similar name. How fiction is present in reality is a dear subject to me.  But Martin's obsession with Gemma Bovery is more about his own personality, his needs to fulfil a void after leaving Paris for the countryside, than his love for literature itself, I think. I don't know if Fabrice Luchini as Martin influenced my views about his character, because, for me, he has the face of a paranoiac man. Well, a movie is made by our recollections and references, and I wasn't able to look at Martin from another perspective. 

One thing was really disturbing for me here: the movie has a serious inconsistency. It transits from comedy to tragedy and back to comedy like nothing was happening. It is a shame, but I guess at some point, it takes itself in a literal manner, going even in the opposite way of the literature work that it honours. One thing that made sense: that all men here would orbit around the beautiful and intriguing Gemma - and in this aspect this movie is very French in an nostalgic and melancholy way. 

Gemma Bovery. Directed by Anne Fontaine. With: Fabrice Luchini (from
The Woman on the 6th Floor), Niels Schneider (from Heartbeats), Gemma Arterton
(from Lost in Austen, that is not in this dare, but is worthy remembering).. France/
UK, 2014, 99 min., Dolby Digital, Color (Cinema).