Emma Bovary is a prime contender for the most hapless heroine in all literature. Her inevitably bad choices make her fallen-woman sisters Anna Karenina and Marguerite Gautier seem models of sagacity by contrast, while her demise easily tops theirs for sheer prolonged agony. Flaubert's
immortal work is actually the most anti-romantic of romantic novels.
If Vincente Minnelli's 1949 version of MADAME BOVARY was a typically overproduced MGM ode to crinolined passion, with Jennifer Jones a swanlike, if histrionically weak, gown-drowned Emma, Claude Chabrol errs just as fully in the opposite direction. His take is coldly clinical, a sociological
tract on the helples...
Released:
1991
Rated:
PG-13
Length:
140 mins