Nor can he get inside the soul of his heroine. But Chabrol, who has Isabelle Huppert as his adulterous Emma, seems to have worked here without the inspiration of a strong personal vision, or the empathetic ability to enter into its creator's skin. He's managed to reproduce Flaubert's clinical fastidiousness, the diligent spadework done in the service of realism, but none of the tensile passion that gave his prose its shapely muscle.Īll this may sound like ragging on the movie for not measuring up to the novel, a long-winded way of saying "I liked the book better." A successful rendition of Emma Bovary's story - of her petit-bourgeois ambitions, her loveless marriage and her extramarital fiascoes - could be presented without following literally in its creator's footsteps, one, for example, that used its source only as a springboard for the adapting artist's leap in the same fictional themes. The movie is coldly done, all right, yet as an exercise in literary transposition it's as joyless as ditch digging.
The veteran French filmmaker's treatment is precise, deliberate and a peerless example of faithful allegiance to its source.īut Chabrol has taken his countryman's advice far too literally.
During his labor on "Madame Bovary," Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend, "Everything should be done coldly, with poise." And in directing his film adaption of the novel, Claude Chabrol has followed the master's instructions to the letter.
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