Madame Bovary

Emma is a farmer's daughter in the provinces, educated at a convent school, expecting the life described in the novels she read. She marries a country doctor named Charles Bovary. He is well meaning, ordinary and promises nothing. She is bored. She is invited to a ball, and the life she sees there leaves a hunger in her. Then an affair, then another, then debt. Everything she buys is bought on notes, and the notes accumulate. Claude Chabrol directs. Isabelle Huppert plays Emma. The source is Gustave Flaubert's novel. Chabrol chose to stay faithful; most of the dialogue is taken straight from the book and the narration comes from it too. What interests the film is not love but money. Emma's ruin comes not from her affairs but from a system of credit; the moneylender is the real force in the narrative. Isabelle Huppert never plays the character for sympathy; Emma is selfish and capricious and unfair to the people around her, and the film does not defend her. Chabrol's cinema is built on describing the provincial bourgeoisie, and this novel is the classic source of the matters he worked at all his life. The visual language is measured; the period is drawn without display and the interiors are constricting. Who it is for: viewers who like literary adaptation, Chabrol and Huppert. Who it is not for: the pace is slow, the narrative is bound too closely to the novel, and it is hard to identify with the character.