‘Bovary’ lacks depth of source material
Print Edition
WHAT is it about Emma Bovary?
She is, of course, one of literature’s most famous and tragic heroines, and so it’s no surprise that directors from Jean Renoir (1934) to Vincente Minnelli (1949) to Claude Chabrol (1991) have tried to immortalize Gustave Flaubert’s frustrated, yearning 19th-century housewife on film. But the task has proven exceedingly difficult.
Now, tantalizingly, we have a female director — Sophie Barthes — attempting to capture Emma’s devastating story. Sad to say, Barthes’ version doesn’t break much ground. In fact, though it’s often beautiful and stars the usually compelling Mia Wasikowska, the film is maddeningly flat, and at times simply tiresome.
The curiosities of this version start at the very beginning. We see Emma running through the woods in a lovely embroidered dress, clutching at her stomach, clearly suffering. Soon she’s lying on the ground, turning pale.
After the opening, we go back to Emma’s school years in a rural Normandy convent. Her education is ending, though; Emma is to be married to a country doctor chosen by her father.
Soon Emma’s off in a horse-drawn carriage to her new life. Charles Bovary (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) is a very decent but dull man, with few ambitions other than to serve the local townspeople. Emma dreams of something more.
One of this film’s main problems surfaces early: a strange disconnect in the way the actors sound. They speak in English, but in their own accents — French accents, British accents, American accents. Wasikowska, though she’s Australian, sounds like she’s in the modern-day US, and her very contemporary manner of speaking becomes increasingly jarring in this period piece.
Emma’s road to ruin — adultery — comes first with the handsome, rakish Marquis (Logan Marshall-Green). Readers know what happens. Alas, along the way to the screen, much of the famous detail in Flaubert’s novel has gotten lost somewhere in those beautiful, misty woods that Emma frequently escapes to, and where our story ends. This movie may find you wanting to pick up the book to fill those gaps. Which isn’t a bad thing at all, of course.
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