Starring: Mia Wakiskowska, Rhys Ifans, Paul Giamatti, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Logan Marshall-Green, Ezra Miller, Laura Carmichael, Richard Cordery, Olivier Gourmet, Luke Tittensor
Distributor: Transmission Films
Runtime: 118 mins. Reviewed in Jul 2015
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Gustave Flaubert was not a prolific novelist. But his Madame Bovary became something of a classic, still highly regarded, still considered an opening into France in the 19th century, manners and morals.
There have been several film versions of his novel, a 1949 Hollywood version with Jennifer Jones, a French version in 1989 with Isabelle Huppert. This time, it is an international co-production, with Sophie Barthes as the co-writer and the director was born in France and educated in South America and the Middle East, an Australian star, Mia Waskikowka, as Emma Bovary. The merchant Lhereux is played by Welsh Rhys Ifans. Charles Bovary is the British Henry Lloyd-Hughes, the Marquis is American Logan Marshall-Green, and Charles Bovary’s friend and adviser, Monsieur Hamois, is American Paul Giamatti.
One of the difficulties for this international co-production is the mixture of accents, especially Mia Wasikowska with something of an American accent which the director thought was the neutral accent. It jars throughout the film.
But, that criticism aside, this is a most impressive production, immersing the audience in the 19th century, costumes and decor, wealth and ordinary life in a provincial country town with visits to the society world, the world of business, and the cathedral in Rouen.
But, the focus has to be on Emma Bovary herself. There is very little dialogue in the first ten to fifteen minutes of the film, rather communication by visuals and body language, Emma as a young girl along with other students in an enclosed school, supervised by nuns, learning to go through all the manners and styles of cultivated young ladies. As she lights a candle in the chapel before she leaves, she prays that she will find a good husband.
As her story unfolds, the audience realises with her, that she was quite inexperienced, sheltered, and had imagined a life that was not to be. She later confides that life has been a disappointment. It seems to begin well with a celebration of her marriage, a meal outside event, with a fond farewell from her doting father. As she leaves the party with her husband, with a horse and cart, she hopes that life as the wife of a country doctor will fulfil her dreams.
It is not that Charles Bovary is a bad man. Rather, he is duty-bound, conscious of his role as a doctor and his responsibilities, a doctor by day, a husband by night, rather unimaginative and without a clue as to his wife’s feelings. The village is small, her husband walking her briefly to the edge of the town – and that is it. She feels confined to the house, becomes bored, leaps at the opportunity when the local Marquis invites her to ride to hounds where she witnesses the brutal slaying of the stag.
Temptation comes to her in the form of the local merchant, Lhereux, very well played by Rhys Ifans. He tempts her with luxury, with beautiful fabrics, the possibility of fine dresses, curtains, rugs, and she indulges her love fine things with reckless extravagance, beguiled by seemingly unlimited credit.
It seems inevitable that she will be looking outside the house for some kind of fulfilment, for relationship, for sexual experience – which she finds for a brief time with the Marquis, and also a brief time with a lawyer in Rouen. But, there is gossip, which her husband does not seem to have heard but, passing the local peasant women in the town, she knows that she is the object of the gossip.
There might be some hope in an incident where she urges her husband to operate on the clubfoot of his friend’s apprentice, thinking that this might be some kind of achievement and that the doctor will be happy to move to the city. She is frustrated by the result.
Whether it is fate, whether it is her disillusionment, whether it is a result of her impetuous nature and self-indulgence, she is on the path to tragedy.
The director stages every scene with impressive visual craft, with fine performances, with a sense of French society at the time, differences in class, wealthy aspirations, the role of duty and its suffocating consequences on those who want more from life.
This is a fine film showing how significant literature can be well dramatised on screen.
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