How much luxury is a human being entitled to? When does dissatisfaction tip into self-indulgence? Such is the subject, in part, of Gustav Flaubert’s 1856 debut. As the priest in his novel counsels our heroine: bread and fire and a good husband is – I’m paraphrasing – pretty good going. He did not mention the need for another movie version of Madame Bovary. So far there have been at least six – so, with this latest, we’re really being spoiled. Perhaps he might have made an exception had he known this latest is the first to be directed by a woman. We will never know.
In fact, the presence of Sophie Barthes behind the camera does not amplify sympathy for our heroine. Rather, the opposite: if anything Barthes seems less in her allure, less tolerant of her tiffs, full-throttle with the vanity and the selfishness.
In part, that’s a result of her main innovation. While the film is shot in sumptuously bleak, socio-realist period style (mud on hems, old women slaving with hay), she does allow her actors to speak English in something approaching their usual manner. This means Ezra Miller, as Emma’s first chaste fling, chats as if he’s on a gap year, Logan Marshall-Green (as the Marquis, her next paramour) comes off like a pouty daytime soap star. Paul Giamatti, as the hustling Monsieur Homais, could have walked off-set of 12 Years a Slave, where he played a similar heartless ham. Rhys Ifans is unmistakably Welsh and the one native Frenchman, Dardennes brothers’ regular Olivier Gourmet (as Emma’s father), just struggles. Where this has most impact, though, is with the Mia Wasikowsa. By dint of accent (she’s going California, rather than her native Aussie), Emma’s ennui becomes the baying whine of a valley girl, the character an ambitious airhead parachuted into rural Normandy.
In fact, that’s no bad thing, and the film certainly perks up in the middle third, when Bovary goes full bitch after attempts to get her kicks from domesticity are rebuffed by hubbie (she makes a tower of profiteroles, he just wants an apple). She responds with retail therapy, blinging out the house and wearing big frocks cut from the curtains. All this is under the director of Ifans’s louche boutique owner, whose portrayal the actor possibly sluts-up a touch too much.
But the level of Emma’s depression remains hard to fathom. The first half is shot almost like a horror, all oppressive rumbling clouds and lashing of mist and shot of her back, suffocating corset laced up like a spine. But is it really so awful? The scene in which Charles acts gauchely at the ball is omitted; likewise the birth of their child. Her boredom is both predictable and abrupt. Plus, Henry Lloyd-Hughes’s doctor is the most sympathetic chap here, despite bad tache and icky way with a fried egg; the actor does almost too good a job of making us see the hurt in his hollow eyes. Listening to his leech stories over the supper table after a day shagging your way through the village doesn’t seem too tough a draw. I’m with the priest.
