![]() Missing is Emma Bovary, at least an Emma Bovary whose sentimental and foolish behavior is of an obsessiveness to become genuinely tragic. ![]() Yet this new "Madame Bovary," which in most other ways heeds its source material with intelligence, lacks one essential. Among other things, Emma's decline and fall is a reflection on life under Louis Philippe, the stolid "citizen king" who carried an umbrella and represented bourgeois values of paralyzing mediocrity. Chabrol evokes the period (circa 1840) obliquely but with accuracy in the story of Emma Bovary, the provincial doctor's wife who loved with adulterous abandon and acquired material goods on credit she didn't possess. All appears to be authentic: country roads, meadows, foliage, weather, coaches, costumes, houses, even the bibelots on a mantelpiece and the circumscribed wanderings of a flock of geese in a barnyard. It was filmed in Rouen and in neighboring villages and landscapes on the lower Seine. Claude Chabrol's "Madame Bovary" is a seemingly meticulous adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's ever-astonishing novel that, on its publication in 1857, was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the French Government for "immorality." ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |