Madame Bovary

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 helplessness and oppression of bourgeois women in the l9th century. Unfortunately, while his premise is undeniably accurate, Flaubert's drama of passion is given short shrift.

Chabrol uses narration at regular intervals in his film; the voice intoning passages straight from the book has a cornball seriousness to it, at once distancing and often superfluous. The actors seem more than capable of expressing the emotions they are feeling, even wordlessly, without our having to have them described for us. As in THE STORY OF WOMEN, Chabrol is abetted in his tractlike purpose by his star, Isabelle Huppert, whose portrait of Emma matches him for calculated schematicism.

Already rather mature for the part, Huppert does not help matters by initially presenting Emma as a hardened urban type, obviously out of place on her father's farm. In the first scenes, she looks world weary rather than virginal. Sharing a drink with Charles Bovary (Jean-Francois Balmer), her future husband, she shoves her tongue into the glass to lap up every last drop. But where this gesture was charmingly innocent in the book, Huppert does it like a woman out of Toulouse-Lautrec. The point is made, and none too subtly, that Emma is thirsty for life. She marries Bovary with nary a whit of romantically anticipatory feeling and, in a dismayingly short time--the wedding night, it would seem--displays full-blown contempt for him.

Chabrol's production of MADAME BOVARY is serviceable, but just that. He does all right in capturing the stultifying atmosphere of village life, but without the psychological insight and uncontrolled emotions which propel the plot, the whole thing becomes merely a carefully wrought setting with a hole at its center. Emma's men, from her husband to her lovers, Rodolphe Boulanger (Christophe Malavoy) and Leon Dupuis (Lucas Belvaux), are all singularly unprepossessing and apart from some differences in grooming, equally dull. This is no doubt what Chabrol had in mind--to further emphasize his heroine's blindly besotted self-delusion. It's mighty distancing to the audience, however. As she staggers from one boring tryst to another, we watch, completely removed, without either a grudging admiration for, or secret, shameful identification with, this romantic fool's tireless self-destruction. The only character with any real juice is Homais (Jean Yanne), who perfectly embodies the smalltown pomposity Flaubert railed against.

However misjudged the Minnelli film was, one had to forgive him for the way he staged the ball scene, which ranks alongside the work of Ophuls and Visconti for dazzling, glamorous bravado. The entire meaning of the book was encapsulated in that sequence: Emma's intoxication with luxury; Charles's bumbling incompatibility in such circumstances; that penultimate moment when she viewed herself in a mirror, supremely desirable and surrounded by attentive swains. Her fate was sealed--one knew that she would spend the rest of her life frantically trying to recapture this glory. Chabrol's fete has all the excitement of a wake: where Jennifer Jones had Miklos Rozsa's magnificently neurotic waltz to compel visceral excitement, poor Huppert must make do with threadbare, timeworn themes from Johann Strauss. She is too modern, too knowing and too capably the mistress of her own fate to successfully convey Emma's victimization by the men and mores of her time.

MADAME BOVARY only comes to life at its close, Flaubert's excruciatingly harrowing finale. Huppert aptly expresses the desperation of her character's whirling about in an unknowingly self-designed trap. Her consumption of poison and subsequent suffering is right up Chabrol's alley and he is unsparing in his depiction of her death throes. Even the unfortunate narration seems appropriate here, a pitiless recitation of the text to the accompaniment of Huppert's horrifically accurate convulsions. From the moment she dips her hands into the deadly powder, stuffing it into her mouth, it's as if this was the one part of the film which really engaged both her and Chabrol. As with THE STORY OF WOMEN, they remember to deliver the goods, at least in the end.

Film is an ideal medium to express nihilistic romantic obsession, as witness works as diverse as LAST TANGO IN PARIS, THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE, JULES AND JIM and THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE. Not coincidentally, these films are all French. It's a particular shame, then, that Chabrol, working in the same tradition, blew this spectacular chance of another definitive rendition by a lack of the correct temperament. (Violence, substance abuse, sexual situations, adult situations, nudity.) leave a comment