Starring Fabrice Luchini and Gemma Arterton. Rated 14A. In English and French, with English subtitles.

Finally, a movie for grownups! You know: people who’ve lived, loved, and travelled and read widely. The hero, if that’s what he is, of the tartly funny Gemma Bovery has perhaps spent too much time with books, however; Martin Joubert (French veteran Fabrice Luchini) was a long-suffering publisher in Paris before moving to rural Normandy and starting over as a not terribly humble baker.

His favourite novel, by far, is Madame Bovary. (“He invented the bored housewife,” Martin explains to a nonreader.) So he feels like he’s seen Gustave Flaubert’s ghost when an English couple move in across the leafy street from him, his frequently exasperated wife (Isabelle Candelier), and their lunkheaded son (Kacey Mottet Klein), who has probably never read a book without pictures. The new pair’s name is Bovery, and the woman happens to be named Gemma—which is, you know, almost Emma. She’s the very picture of vaguely unthinking eros, as embodied by a former Bond Girl whose name is also Gemma—Arterton, that is.

In Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel, initially serialized in the Guardian, this catalytic character was an illustrator, but here, as adapted by Pascal Bonitzer, she’s a rather low-level interior decorator. In both versions, it was the idea of French-fluent husband Charlie (Jason Flemyng) to cross the channel, but he soon has doubts—especially after the restless Gemma meets a handsome young aristocrat (Niels Schneider) whose attentions likewise raise the possessive ire of Martin, who increasingly imagines that he’s somehow stage-managing a modern remake of Flaubert’s masterpiece.

The crux of this sun-dappled movie is less about Gemma’s romantic dilemma than Martin’s deliciously self-torturing fixations, and potential tragedy is neatly turned to farce. This difficult trick is handled with exquisite tonal control by Anne Fontaine, who previously directed Luchini in The Girl From Monaco, another comedy about a sensualist who doesn’t know her own crazy-making strength. One hates to laugh at other people’s misfortunes, but isn’t that one reason so many books are written?