A damned sight better than the damnedly unsightly and uninsightful recent rendering of Madame Bovary by Sophie Barthes, GEMMA BOVERY marks the second time Gemma Arterton has played a character created by Posy Simmonds, the first being her fine characterisation of Tamara Drewe.

Gemma plays Gemma Bovery who has relocated to France from England with her furniture restorer husband, to start afresh in a place where they take living seriously.

Gemma’s neighbour, the local baker Martin Joubert, is totally smitten, not just by her natural charm but by her name and the very fact that Flaubert set his famous novel in the locality they live.

Like Emma Bovary, Gemma Bovery has been brought to the environs of Rouen, and Martin frets that she will recreate the fate of her literary namesake.

Will the road to Rouen be the road to ruin for this earthy, gorgeous Englishwoman and just how far will life imitate literature?

Directed with a deft touch by Anne Fontaine, who co-wrote the script with Pascal Bonitzer, GEMMA BOVERY is elegantly distanced from the formulaic rom com merry go round by linking fantasy and fate to a form of fetishism in the reactions of the baker, whose needs are stronger than his kneads, born and bred from his fixation with the Bovary book.

Fabrice Luchini is utterly fabulous as the fabulist bread maker, an inventive voyeur who invests a wistful charm into the character, projecting a protectiveness as well as a resigned fait accompli to the situation.

Beautifully shot by Christophe Beaucarne, Fontaine’s cinematographer of choice recently, and boasting an exquisite production design from Arnaud de Moleron, GEMMA BOVERY is a feast for the eye as well as being an entertaining, enchanting and thoroughly engaging re-imagining of a timeless tale, a cross channel channelling of Flaubert’s famous fiction.