Anne Fontaine’s ‘Gemma Bovery’

Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, set in mid-19th century Normandy and a pillar of French literature, has been filmed on several occasions, for example by Claude Chabrol in 1991 and by Sophie Barthes in 2014, soon to be released in the UK. We are also going to have the opportunity to see Anne Fontaine’s Gemma Bovery, a version at one remove from Flaubert’s and with a British twist. Posy Simmonds started her cartoon comic strips in the Guardian in the 1970s. They offered a satirical view of contemporary middle-class life, at least as lived by Guardian readers, and anticipated the sharper style of some of Grayson Perry’s pots and tapestries. In 1999 the Guardian ran Simmonds’ reworking of Flaubert as a graphic novel in which Emma Bovary becomes Gemma Bovery, half of an expatriate British couple living in present-day Normandy. It was later published in book form, with rather more text than would be found in a normal bande dessinée (see below, thanks to Amazon):

It is hardly a plot spoiler to say that Emma’s enthusiasm for adultery ends badly - if it hadn’t, the prosecution of Flaubert in 1857 for obscenity might not have failed. Gemma’s particular fate is retold in Simmond’s version through the eyes of the local baker (Boulanger with a small b …) and Flaubert admirer, Raymond Joubert. In the film he becomes Martin Joubert and is played by Fabrice Luchini, an actor whose expression conveys paragraphs. The intertwining of Joubert and Flaubert brings to mind Luchini in Philippe-le-Guay’s Alceste à bicyclette, where the literary presence was Molière and the setting the Ile de Ré. Gemma Arterton as Gemma Bovery is well-equipped to set male pulses racing and there are some comical scenes, for example when Martin teaches Gemma to knead dough. The attractive locations apart, Gemma Bovery is carried by Luchini and Arterton, the two leads overshadowing the rest of the cast, even Jason Flemyng as husband Charles/Charlie. Some of the other British characters seem to have been cast in the style of Woody Allen’s London films – all spoken English is now apparently a hybrid of Mockney and Estuarial.

I thought it was a better film than Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe in 2010, also with Arterton in the title role and based on a Simmonds graphic novel modernising Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novel Far from the Madding Crowd. Tamara Drewe was given 4* ratings by Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian and Philip French in the Observer - perhaps not surprisingly - and elsewhere. It will be interesting to see the UK critics’ reactions to Gemma Bovery next month.

Sculpture in Gloucestershire

This was also the title of a post here four years ago which covered an exhibition at Gallery Pangolin in Chalford and that year’s Fresh Air outdoor sculpture exhibition not far away in Quenington. History repeats itself, sometimes agreeably, because Pangolin are putting on their fourth one-man show of works by Terence Coventry, Sculpture and Works on paper, while Fresh Air 2015 has just finished.

Coventry was born in Birmingham in 1938 but has spent much of his life in Cornwall including a period working for Barbara Hepworth in St Ives. Some of his spare and dramatic pieces are made in Corten steel (COR-TEN) which weathers to a stable oxide surface, for example Corten Owl I (below left) and Corten Torso (below right):

Bronzes of various sizes at Pangolin include Man Releasing Bird II and Woman Releasing Bird (below, left and right): 

Another bronze, Boar II (below top) and the powder-coated steel, Monumental Steel Bull (below lower):

were at Gloucester Cathedral during Crucible2 last year, as were bronzes by Coventry, Monumental Gannet Head, and by Jon Buck, Midnite Movie Heads, both to be seen at Fresh Air 2015:

There were over 170 items at Quenington, so what follows is just a few of those which I liked, starting with a bronze by Carol Peace, Red Ribbon (below left), quite different from Edwina Bridgeman’s Cos After All (below right), constructed from recycled plastic crates:

I’m not sure garden sculpture is at its best when it attempts to compete for space in the border as a quasi-vegetable (top), but Dorcas Casey’s Mule Head (lower) was clearly there on its own terms:

as were Tom Hackett’s Shaggy Dog Stories (below left), funded by Arts Council England, and Paul Cox’s Rabbits (£3000 and £1390 each respectively): 

What would I like to have taken home to my own garden? Probably Wendy Lawrence’s ceramic Disc Form (below):

Terence Coventry, Sculpture and Works continues until 24 July. Fresh Air 2015 ended on 5 July but will be back in 2017, all being well.

I posted here about Fresh Air 2013.

Bertrand Tavernier’s 'Quai d’Orsay'

Bertrand Tavernier, born in 1941, is one of France’s most long-standing film directors, probably best known outside France for Round Midnight (1986). His most recent film, Quai d’Orsay (2013), was not released in the UK* and had a limited US distribution under the title The French Minister. (The French foreign affairs ministry is located in Paris at the Quai d’Orsay and is often referred to by its location.)

Tavernier’s film begins with a young énarque**, Arthur Vlaminck (Raphaël Personnaz), being escorted through the grandeur of the Quai (similar to that of the Elysée revealed in Patrick Rotman’s documentary, Le Pouvoir) to an interview for a post as a personal speechwriter for Alexandre Taillard de Vorms (Thierry Lhermitte), the minister. Getting the job turns out to be the start of Vlaminck’s problems as de Vorms, moving from one intellectual flight of fancy to another, endlessly rejects his speeches and urges their improvement with references to poetry and philosophy. He also encounters rivalry and intrigue among the minister’s other advisers, including the vampish and ambitious adviser on Africa, played by one Julie Gayet (see below). The only clear heads are those of de Vorms’ directeur de cabinet, Claude Maupas (Niels Arestrup), unflappable with years of experience of crisis management, and Arthur’s partner, Marina (Anaïs Demoustier) a sensible teacher. After excursions to Berlin and francophone Africa, de Vorms goes to the UN in New York to deliver a grandiloquent speech articulating his country’s foreign policy.

Personnaz and Gayet

Anyone interested in France and its ruling elite (or has had to write speeches for a boss who only knows what he doesn't want to say) is bound to find the film very amusing, and played to great comic effect by Lhermitte, more subtly by Arestrup. But the background to Quai d’Orsay is informative, too, the film having been adapted from two bandes dessinées (BD, comic books) of the same name by Christophe Blain and Abel Lanzac. Blain was the illustrator, but the writer, “Abel Lanzac”, turned out to be a pseudonym adopted by Antonin Baudry who had worked as a speechwriter for Dominique de Villepin, foreign minister from 2002 to 2004, the period leading up to the Iraq war. When the first BD came out in 2010, de Villepin’s response was surprising but probably wise in the circumstances:

I found the drawings very telling, very strong and the dialogues some of the best descriptions I have read, heard or seen of life inside a ministry.

Unusually, both BDs are available in English translation under the title Weapons of Mass Diplomacy - a typical scene below:

The film captures the look of the drawings in the BD remarkably well, right up to de Vorms’ UN speech, and its writing credits are shared by Blain, Lanzac and Tavernier. I suspect that it was Lanzac/Baudry’s intention to satirise the Quai as an institution rather than de Villepin’s speech which is highly regarded by many in France, although the man clearly has his idiosyncrasies.

Sudhir Hazareesingh in his new book, How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People, begins the Introduction with a section, Le Style Français, which he sees as epitomised by that speech:

In February 2003, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin delivered a speech at a Security Council debate at the United Nations in New York on whether to sanction the use of force against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Speaking in the name of an 'old country' and an 'old continent' that had experienced 'wars, occupations and barbarity', Villepin declared - prophetically - that a war against the Iraqi regime would have catastrophic consequences for the region's stability: 'The option of war may appear a priori the most effective. But let us not forget that, after winning the war, peace has to be built.' Stressing that 'the use of force [was] not justified,' he ended by expressing his faith in the capacity of the international community to build a more harmonious world: ‘We are the guardians of an ideal, the guardians of a conscience. The heavy responsibility and the immense honour which is ours should lead us to give priority to peaceful disarmament.' 

Villepin's speech was welcomed across the world, typifying as it did a shared collective aspiration for a different kind of politics, grounded in humanism rather than force. And yet in his vision, and the way in which it was elaborated, there was also something very recognizably, unquestionably French: the seductive masculinity and rhetorical verve, which drew on the nation's finest traditions of public oratory; the appeal to reason and logic, with the issue under discussion being neatly framed into binary oppositions (conflict and harmony; self-interest and the common good; morality and power politics); the sense of articulating an age-old wisdom resting on centuries of often painful historical experience; and a confident optimism, underpinned by a belief in France's cultural superiority. Indeed, although it did not do so explicitly - and was all the more compelling for it - the speech threw down the gauntlet to George Bush's America and its complaisant ally, Great Britain, and held up the actions of these nations to the court of international public opinion as threats to peace and stability. This silent demonization of the dastardly Anglo-Saxons' was the climax of Villepin's oratorical artistry along with his characteristically French claim to be speaking in the name of universal principles - all the more sincerely so, one felt, because these happened to coincide exactly with French national interests.

I should say that Hazareesingh’s book, as one might expect coming from a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, is examining French intellectuality at the highest levels, those of literature, philosophy, the Académie and the grandes écoles. Cinema is only touched on briefly and certainly not BDs!

* However, the DVD is on sale in France in 2015 for about 10 euros (or less as part of a multi-buy) and comes with English subtitles.

** A graduate of the ÉNA, École nationale d'administration, one of France’s elite grandes écoles.

The RA Summer Exhibition 2015

The current Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London is the best I can remember in over 20 years, most of it good, very little bad or ugly, and the most enjoyable one too, with virtually no photography restrictions and images of all the works available on line. The co-ordinator, Michael Craig-Martin RA, has made the gallery spaces more colourful and reallocated the architecture and other themes within the Academy galleries. At which point I suggest that anyone who reads this post as far as this would, instead of continuing here, probably gain more from exploring the RA Exhibition website pages which include a short introduction by Craig-Martin, behind-the-scenes videos and personal selections by Sebastian Faulks, Grayson Perry, Cath Kidston and others.

But for the record, here are a few items which registered with me out of more than 1100 on show in this slyly cerebral Summer Exhibition. Even before going in, I liked Jim Lambie’s treatment of the main staircase with ZOBOP (above). Craig-Martin chose magenta for Gallery III, enhancing all the work there, including his own Untitled (Watch) (below centre).

In that gallery I was also struck by Gillian Ayres' Tremenheere (below top left), Chantal Joffe’s Megan in Spotted Silk Blouse (below top right) and Mick Moon’s Noon Fishing and Dawn Fishing (below lower left and right respectively).

Gallery I this year is given over to small works with the exception of Grayson Perry’s tapestry, Julie and Rob, (below). As explained here in a post in May about A House for Essex, Julie Cope is a fictional “secular Essex everywoman”. Her charm bracelet includes that county’s shield, a cassette tape (a generational thing) and the cause of her untimely decease – was there a particular choice of wild flowers for the bouquet?

The Large Weston Room (below) now has the architectural models and drawings – I sometimes wonder whether the notions on show will ever be constructed but inspiration has to start somewhere, as with Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton.

The Small Weston Room, no longer crammed with small works, is given over to some impressive drawings in ink on torn pages by William Kerridge, installed there by the artist, for example Untitled (The Periphery) (below):

There were two abstract pieces appealed to me in Gallery IV: Christine Stark’s When D'You Last Think You Saw It? (below upper) and Marion Jones’ Bars and Triangles (below lower):

Galleries V and VII are given over to prints, scores of them. So here are just a few; John Duffin’s etching Thames Bridges East (top left below) and Julian Opie’s Tourist with Beard (top right below); and two with South West scenes, Catherine Greenwood’s Silbury Treasure and Iona Howard’s Goonhilly Downs (below lower left and right respectively):

Between V and VII, Gallery VI is arranged by Craig-Martin with several interesting pieces including Lisa Milroy’s Black Dress (below left) and Gary Hume’s The Blue Ground (below right):

which is in the background to this photograph of Anish Kapoor’s study of refraction, Untitled (below):

Gallery VIII provided many fine things, including another South West scene, Cyril Croucher’s PZ101 at Mousehole (below left, PZ indicates a fishing boat registered at Penzance, Cornwall) and two contrasting bronzes by James Butler, Soldier and In the Sun (below right, upper and lower respectively):

Gallery IX, arranged by Alison Wilding and Bill Woodrow around Michael Sandle’s monumental bronze, As Ye Sow So Shall Ye Reap: An Allegory (Acknowledgements to Holman Hunt) (below left), included some interesting political pieces like Bob and Roberta Smith’s Sir Peter Bazalgette's P45, positioned just below Allen Jones’ Salome, (below right):

and Emily Allchurch’s Babel London (After Bruegel) (below) with its warning signs:

The Lecture Room is given over to things sculptural, for example Antony Gormley’s series of six “Small” below:

Nicola Hicks’ Relic (below top) and Dido Crosby's  5 Sheep and a Goat (below lower) seem particularly flattered by the sky blue walls:

More challenging are Eva Rothschild’s What the Eye Wants (below top) and Phillip King’s The Unpainted Gum Tree (below lower):

Geoffrey Clarke’s Taunton Deane Crematorium Test Panel was at Crucible2 in November.

Finally, Gallery X is exclusive to Tom Philips’ A Humement (1966-2015), a page-by-page artistic reworking of an old book (below):

The RA Summer Exhibition 2015 ends on 16 August.