Madame Bovary

Directed by: Vincente Minnelli

RS: Not Rated

1949 Romance

Gustave Flaubert's classic novel about Emma Bovary, a passionate woman who rebels against the conventions that stifle her as the wife of a dull country doctor, caused a furor in 1857. But for those who weren't morally outraged, the book struck a responsive chord. "Madame Bovary, c'est moi," said Flaubert, indicating that Emma's discontent crossed gender lines. Today, Emma's plight still draws us in. This new film version, from writer-director Claude Chabrol, is the ninth so far. Emma's influence even extends to Disney's Beauty and the Beast, in which the heroine, Belle, warbles, "I want much more than this provincial life."

Obviously, Chabrol also thinks of Emma as a modern woman. But the triumphant film he has fashioned isn't a tricked-up, revisionist adaptation. Starring the incomparable Isabelle Huppert, Chabrol's film stays rigorously faithful to Flaubert, unlike Vincente Minnelli's overproduced 1949 film with Jennifer Jones. Shooting near Rouen, where Flaubert lived (the location is vibrantly captured by Jean Rabier's camera), and taking the dialogue directly from the book, Chabrol respects Flaubert and the audience by allowing Madame Bovary to speak without interference to a new generation.

Huppert doesn't sentimentalize a woman who cheats on her husband, neglects her child, drives her family into debt and swallows arsenic. You won't warm to Huppert's grasping Emma, but you will understand her. Emma marries the older Charles Bovary (Jean-Francois Balmer) because being a doctor's wife is a step up socially. Emma has the cunning to get what she wants; what she lacks is discretion and direction. She derives her goals from romance novels. When she and Charles are dutifully invited to a formal dance, Emma enjoys a brief shining moment as the belle of the ball; it's the closest she ever comes to a wish fulfilled.

Emma's affairs with the decadent landowner Rodolphe (the excellent Christophe Malavoy) and the shallow lawyer LTon (Lucas Belvaux) aren't motivated by sex or love. She squanders Charles's earnings on pampering these men, transforming them into what she thinks is an ideal suitor. Money is simply a means of defining the world on her terms. Chabrol comes down hard on the merchants and usurers who exploit the delusions that destroy Emma.

Huppert is astounding; her eyes show the flashing fire of the woman Emma might have been in a less constricted society. It's the fight in Emma, not her fatalism, that Huppert and Chabrol are celebrating. There's nothing old hat or irrelevant about Madame Bovary, which ranks among the year's best and most provocative films. Chabrol shrewdly realizes that even near the close of this allegedly enlightened century, we can still identify with someone who's getting her options squeezed.

PETER TRAVERS
RS 621