gavin6942
In nineteenth-century France, the romantic daughter of a country squire (Emma Rouault) marries a dull country doctor (Charles Bovary). To escape boredom, she throws herself into love affairs with a suave local landowner (Rodolphe Boulanger) and a law student (Leon Dupuis), and runs up ruinous debts. This film version closely follows Flaubert's novel and includes most of the famous scenes, such as the wedding, the ball, the agricultural fair, the operation on the clubfoot, and the opera in Rouen."Madame Bovary" was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film as well as for the Academy Award for Costume Design. It was also entered into the 17th Moscow International Film Festival where Isabelle Huppert won the award for Best Actress. As she should.As with any great work of literature, this story has been adapted again and again. But I might have to say this is the definitive version, almost epic in its length and breadth, and a solid attempt to stay true to the novel. Typically I favor earlier in carnations, and by 1991 there were many... but this now is the one any future version must be measured against.
writers_reign
On paper Huppert plus Chabrol is an unbeatable parlay but several times it has run out of gas and this, alas, is no exception. Bizarrely Chabrol has opted to film a novel whose essence is tedium - Emma's ennui with the minutiae of day-to-day life is the key to her subsequent actions - by speeding up the pre-marriage sequences so that instead of the stately courtship that would be more apropos we get a scene with Charles Bovary asking her father for Emma's hand; an intermediate scene with Charles watching for the signal (the opening of a shutter) that will signify Emma's agreement and then (all this in less barely one minute of screen time) we cut to the wedding feast. True, Chabrol slows it down later - as well he might with two and a half hours to play with - but the contrast tends to be off-putting. In its favour are the fine sense of period, costumes, decor, etc and though woefully miscast Huppert doesn't do mediocre and remains watchable in anything but overall one is left with the impression of a fine opportunity squandered.
Hammerfanatic46
Strangely anaemic version of Flauberts classic novel.This movie looks wonderful ,meticulously recreating a French country town in the mid-Nineteenth Centuary , but singularly fails to inject any life into its characters.The main problem is the normally excellent Isabelle Huppert's performance as the eponymous Madame B,not only does she fail to register any real emotion,far less do justice to the many facets of Flauberts creation,but at 39 ,she is,frankly, just tOo old for the role.The Film is also severely hampered by a leaden script that commits the cardinal sin of adapting a great novel,it employs the device of having a narrator read large chunks of the book.One would think that the 1974 Version of "The Great Gatsby" had amply demonstrated the folly of this approach.A voice-over reading portions of the source-novel is just not cinematic.The BBC's 2000 TV production was a much better attempt at capturing the atmosphere of the Novel as well as the complexities and contradictions of the central character.
Sleepy-17
Isabelle Huppert plays the part very coldly, which makes the story more distant. She seems to view romantic sexual pleasure as something to be acquired instead of experienced. The medical scenes, however, are very well done and almost shocking in the staid context of the film's sensationless depiction of marital infidelity. Other Bovarys (Jennifer Jones and Frances O'Connor) have been much more sensual, whereas Isabel is pretty but it never seems that having sexual intercourse with her would be fun. Sorry to put it so crudely, but I always thought that sexual attraction was the point of the story, and also the source of its tragedy.
AD
