Her Emma moves through the film like an icon, as if she had read Flaubert's glowing reviews and accepted them as tributes to herself. There is something much more wrong-headed going on.įrom the beginning of the film until very near the end, Miss Huppert's Emma is imperious and rather frosty, so level-headed and so in command that it seems impossible that she could mess up her life with such wanton and short-sighted thoroughness. Looks are not Miss Huppert's insurmountable problem. Yet she is somewhat too innocent to be credible.
Jennifer Jones, the Emma in Vincente Minnelli's stylish and glossy 1949 M-G-M adaptation, is virtually the image of the woman described in the novel. It makes no difference that the pretty, freckled, reddish-blond Isabelle Huppert, who plays Emma, appears to be too old and doesn't look at all like Flaubert's dark-haired heroine whose eyes, though brown, "seemed black under their long eyelashes." Missing is Emma Bovary, at least an Emma Bovary whose sentimental and foolish behavior is of an obsessiveness to become genuinely tragic.
Yet this new "Madame Bovary," which in most other ways heeds its source material with intelligence, lacks one essential. Among other things, Emma's decline and fall is a reflection on life under Louis Philippe, the stolid "citizen king" who carried an umbrella and represented bourgeois values of paralyzing mediocrity. Chabrol evokes the period (circa 1840) obliquely but with accuracy in the story of Emma Bovary, the provincial doctor's wife who loved with adulterous abandon and acquired material goods on credit she didn't possess. All appears to be authentic: country roads, meadows, foliage, weather, coaches, costumes, houses, even the bibelots on a mantelpiece and the circumscribed wanderings of a flock of geese in a barnyard. It was filmed in Rouen and in neighboring villages and landscapes on the lower Seine.
Claude Chabrol's "Madame Bovary" is a seemingly meticulous adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's ever-astonishing novel that, on its publication in 1857, was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the French Government for "immorality."
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