Life imitates art in uncanny ways when Gemma Bovery (Gemma Arterton) and her husband Charles (Jason Flemyng) move to a charming old farmhouse in the very same Norman village where Flaubert’s classic novel “Madame Bovary” was written a century earlier. Local baker and Flaubert expert Martin Joubert (Fabrice Luchini) becomes entranced with Gemma; it doesn’t take long before he is drawing parallels between the literary and real life women. Gemma catches the eye of a handsome local playboy, and when her magnetic ex suddenly reappears, she seems to be fulfilling Joubert’s worst fears that her destiny is linked to that of Flaubert’s doomed heroine. Director Anne Fontaine’s clever adaptation is at once a cheeky literary mash-up, a sensuous romance, a witty feminist commentary and a heady celebration
of French provincial life.