No, But I've Seen The Movie: MADAME BOVARY

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 22:00:00 GMT

For a book that's often referred to as one of the all-time great unfilmable novels, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary has a long and storied history on the screen. It's been adapted for the cinema no less than six times, and an additional five adaptations for the small screen. The most well-received version, however, is Claude Chabrol's 1991 adapatation. It was widely praised at the Moscow International Film Festival when it debuted; it got Chabrol his first-ever Golden Globe nomination; and it was especially beloved in France — and who better to judge the success of an adaptation of one of France's greatest novels by one of France's greatest filmmakers than the French? Then again, there's always the counter-example of Jerry Lewis to argue against their taste as a nation. It's understandable why so many moviemakers have been drawn to the story of Emma Bovary; she's one of the most fully fleshed-out characters in all of fiction, entirely believable and completely three-dimensional. Her flaws run as deep as any character in modern literature, and her personality is as recognizable today as it was when the book was published in 1857. However, it's also understandable why so many adaptations of the book go astray; Flaubert's greatest strength as a writer was not his ability to draw deep and true psychological portraits — though that was an ability of his rivaled perhaps only by Dostoevski, his true power lay in his ability to realize those portraits in cool, elegant prose unparalleled by his peers. Due to the essential difference between the media of film and literature, much of that prose, and the incomparably refined descriptions and turns of phrase that made Flaubert's work so compelling, are inevitably lost in a filmed retelling. But in Claude Chabrol, Madame Bovary found perhaps the one director who truly shared the novelist's style and sensibility. Did he deliver a film worthy of the novel? Or was it just another misstep?

WHAT IT HAD: That rarest of things, a director sympatico with the novelist. Claude Chabrol is a holdover from the first sparks of the French New Wave, but he's developed into a filmmaker with a very unique style and signature. He's often called the French Hitchcock, a lazy shorthand that's unfair to both men — his early suspense films have given way to extremely deep and adept dramas later in life. He's also exceptionally skilled at portraying female characters, especially ones who are sympathetic despite very profound moral flaws, a perfect description of Emma Bovary. The set and costume design in the adaptation are flawless (Corinne Jorry was nominated for an Oscar for the latter), and Isabelle Huppert plays the role to chilly perfection. Her performances suggests depths that the novel reveals in full.

WHAT IT LACKED: It takes an actress of Huppert's skill to suggest those depths, and not everyone in Chabrol's Madame Bovary has that level of skill. Jean Yanne, in particular, isn't quite up to the demanding task of playing M. Homais, and other members of the supporting cast attempt to suggest with noise what Huppert conjures with silence. Elsewhere, silence works against the movie: since Chabrol cannot tell, he must show, and at times, this is tremendously effective, but at other times it can slow the movie to a tedious crawl. Where Flaubert can stun with perfect description and narrative, Chabrol must hope that the image alone can overwhelm until the next progress of plot. This gambit (which, to be fair, is no fault of Chabrol's) succeeds when Huppert is front and center and fails when she's not.

DID IT SUCCEED?: For the most part, yes — albeit for entirely different reasons than the book succeeded. Madame Bovary is a pretty perfect example of why great novels are extremely difficult to transfer to great films, but Chabrol manages to make at least a very good film by sidestepping most of the requirements for making a straight-up adaptation of the book. Where the film doesn't work, it's because it is simply impossible to convey some of the complex ideas in Flaubert's prose through the medium of film, and where it succeeds, it succeeds because of his skill as a filmmaker. Chabrol's Madame Bovary plays far more to his strengths than to Flaubert's, but where the two interweave — specifically in the portrayal of strong, difficult, women morally uprooted by circumstance — the overlap makes for a fine film.

Take Five: The Classics

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

"Read the classics, sir," advises Jason Miller's Lieutenant Reno in The Ninth Configuration. "It improves the entire respiratory system." Sure, but who has time for that? When it comes to the great works of western literature, it's all well and good for academics to slog through the thousands of pages of their Penguin Classics editions, but we're busy people. We have screenings of Saw V: Saw Harder to get to. We need our classics simple, direct, stripped of poetry and obscurity, and preferably less than two hours long and starring someone who can sport a decent six-pack. Robert Zemeckis' all-star adaptation of Beowulf, opening wide this weekend, is much more our speed; if we have to sit through a bunch of crazy Old English dialogue, even brought up to speed by comics legend Neil Gaiman, it better be accompanied by some naked Angelina Jolie. Here's a handful of other cinema-clarified classics.

FRANKENSTEIN (1931)

America's middle school students have one thing to look forward to in the long slog through English classes: Frankenstein. It's part of the holy triumvirate of bona fide classics (along with Dracula and Beowulf) that spice up the prose with a good solid monster. Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his "Adam" have become such iconic figures in our culture that it's hard to imagine a time when he was perceived as anything other than Boris Karloff's shambling, neck-bolded patchwork man; and James Whale's confident direction here, remarkably sophisticated for a film that was made over seventy-five years ago, is still electric today.

TOM JONES (1963)

As school-assigned, instructive Classics of Western Literature go, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is a relative favorite, containing as it does lots of screwing and fart jokes. Tony Richardson's big blow-out adaptation, like the novel a compelling combination of arch and earthy, tries to bring the same tastes-good-and-good-for-you sensibility to the big screen and largely succeeds, despite having been made in the early 1960s when a few of the book's raunchier moments had to be implied rather than depicted. Aided by some gorgeous photography, the film boasts a terrific cast led by young and studly Albert Finney and Susannah York, who's never looked better.

MADAME BOVARY (1991)

Though a number of adaptations of Gustave Flaubert's essential novel have been attempted over the years, perhaps the definitive version comes from the talented and prolific Claude Chabrol. In many ways, he's the perfect director to take on the project: quintessentially French, like Flaubert, but also like Flaubert, just alienated enough from his society and times to view them with a properly jaundiced eye. Given his history of making compelling films about unsatisfied women who come to a bloody end because of their frustration and lack of options, Chabrol was almost born to make Madame Bovary, and he couldn't have made a better choice to play Emma than his Violette Noziere star, the phenomenal Isabelle Huppert.

RICHARD III (1995)

When discussing the classics and their transition to film, there's no avoiding ol' Will Shakespeare. But if you're trying to get the kids on your side, forget glitzy romance and postmodernist flash; forsake the pomposities of a Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and go straight for Richard Loncraine's inventive, delightful Richard III. Nothing animates a Shakespeare play like a good villain, and Ian McKellen — who wrote the adaptation — plays the twisted, perverse, gleefully murderous Richard to the hilt. The setting is likewise outstanding, and the conceit of setting the story in an alternate England of the 1930s, overcome by fascist nationalism, works like a charm, particularly in a dynamite opening sequence.

TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY (2005)

If someone tells you often enough that a great novel is unfilmable, you might just start to believe it. For the first hundred years or so of the motion picture industry, no one would tough Laurence Sterne's brilliant, hilarious, rambling Tristram Shandy — a work of postmodernist genius written at least a hundred years before there was even modernism — with a ten-foot lens. It took the arrival of Michael Winterbottom, a man who has made a career out of not listening to people when they tell him what kind of movie he should make next, for anything remotely resembling a big-screen adaptation to be made, and even then, it was more of an impression than it was a reproduction.

— Leonard Pierce

The Screengrab : madame bovary

No, But I've Seen The Movie: MADAME BOVARY

Take Five: The Classics