Madame Bovary is a disarmingly simple story – the wife of a provincial doctor grows bored and unsatisfied in life before her search for passion leads to tragedy – but the inner life of Emma Bovary is so complex and finely drawn that it continues to entice film actresses and directors over a hundred and fifty years later. Emma has been played by actresses embodying classic Hollywood glamour like Jennifer Jones, or smoldering intensity like Isabelle Huppert and now is brought to new life by the team of Mia Wasikowska and director Sophie Barthes.
Dispensing with most of the backstory, except for a brief scene showing Emma’s early flirtations with spirituality in a convent, Barthes launches us quickly into the marriage of Emma and Charles Bovary (Henry Lloyd-Hughes). While Charles contentedly builds his medical practice, Emma is left to daydream and find extramarital suitors in the form of the romantic young clerk Leon (Ezra Miller) and the dashing but patronizing Marquis (Logan Marshall-Green, encompassing both the Marquis and Rodolfe from the book). Her cravings for romance progress in tandem with a craving for material luxuries bought on credit, supplied by Monsieur Lheureux (Rhys Ifans), which eventually land her in debt and ruin.
This is a mostly faithful adaptation; its primary point of difference is foregrounding the economic aspect of the novel. In the novel, Emma’s taste for the finer things is an outgrowth of her desperate need for love. In this version, Lheureux the salesman and moneylender, played with aplomb by Rhys Ifans as a predatory, silk-clad vampire, is introduced earlier and given more screentime and better lines than her two lovers; Lheureux is the man most responsible for Emma’s downfall. “Each moment you do not possess what you love is a moment not spent in love,” he coos to Emma as he sells her the trinkets he knows will land her in debt.
The cinematography wonderfully evokes the Norman countryside using muted colors and grey skies, reflecting Emma’s perception of her surroundings, instead of resorting to the light-drenched pastoralism that afflicts many period pieces like Thomas Vinterberg's Far From the Madding Crowd. But that muted quality unfortunately extends to too many other aspects of the film. Flaubert’s novel is correctly celebrated as a milestone in the development of literary realism, and Barthes admirably recreates that extensive detail. But that’s a distinction for academics – the reason readers continually return to the story is Flaubert’s exquisite gift for bringing Emma’s wild yearnings and vivid inner life to a fever pitch in prose, which Barthes cannot replicate on screen. Wasikowska, while very talented, never quite shows why men keep falling for Emma, though she does endow the character with a withdrawn, otherworldly quality that fits her flights into fantasy.
Overall, this Madame Bovary falls prey to the curse of adapting classics – an adaptation must be masterful and definitive to escape the large shadow of the source’s cultural legacy. Sophie Barthes’ Madame Bovary is pretty good, although probably not good enough to escape that shadow.
