Mia Waskikowska plays Emma in Sophie Barthes’s version of Madame Bovary; as with many productions, it fails to capture the nuance in Faubert’s story.
Filmmakers have been trying to capture Madame Bovary on the screen ever since the movies learned to talk. But, although film technology has improved, the challenge of giving a good account of Flaubert's novel seems only to have become more difficult.
You can see one of the problems during almost every minute of Sophie Barthes's new version, which premiered at TIFF on Wednesday. Emma Bovary is supposedly revolted by her commonplace surroundings and tedious life in provincial Normandy, but the camera constantly tries to seduce us with picturesque imagery. Her boring village becomes our period-movie theme park.
Worse, Emma turns into a straightforward romantic heroine. Flaubert tells us throughout the book that her notions of love are warped by cheap literary romanticism, but Barthes presents her as a true-love warrior who just picks the wrong men. We can't blame her for cheating on her dull husband, and take her side entirely, as Flaubert never lets us do.
When Madame Bovary was published in 1857, it was hailed and denounced as a bleak satire of contemporary life and mores. Henry James called it a masterpiece, although said its subject was "all that makes life ignoble and vulgar and sterile."
But when the novel becomes a film, with all the investment that requires, the satire and sterility mostly fall away. The lure of period romance is too strong, and the book's real outlook too unpalatable.
Barthes shows Emma (played by Mia Wasikowska) relishing her affairs as genuine experiences of real life. But Flaubert tells us that, after her first sexual encounter with a rakish landowner, "she recalled the heroines of the books she had read, and this lyrical throng of adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her." Her erotic experience is actually mediated and guided by literary fantasies. How can you show that on film? Even Claude Chabrol's relatively faithful 1991 adaptation couldn't or wouldn't do it.
When Emma, in the book, realizes that a local law clerk adores her, she imagines in solitude that she loves him back, although "in his presence, her emotions subsided, leaving only an immense astonishment that ended in sadness." She's in love with an idea of love, not the man himself, but the film's Léon (Ezra Miller) is adorable, and Emma genuinely falls for him.
Barthes constantly feels the need to improve on Flaubert, adding and dropping scenes and inventing social metaphors – mainly spiderwebs and corsets. Her lack of faith in the material seems to infect the cast, who don't speak normally but in a kind of period-film diction, in which contractions are forbidden.
Even Paul Giamatti, who was so good in Barthes's clever debut feature Cold Souls, seems fake and uncomfortable as the pharmacist Homais.
Another way of dealing with Madame Bovary is to rewrite it entirely. The English writer and illustrator Posy Simmonds did this in her 1999 graphic novel, Gemma Bovery, which has also turned up at TIFF in a mainly French-language film version directed by Anne Fontaine (Coco Before Chanel).
Gemmy Bovery is set in recent times, and its heroine is an Englishwoman who decamps with her husband Charlie for what she imagines will be a more rich and exciting life in rural Normandy. Simmonds's satirical target is the typical English fantasy about having a house in France, where all food is delicious and every vista is enchanting.
Gemma soon finds the reality less appealing, and embarks on affairs that mirror those of Emma. Her disenchantment is observed by Joubert, a literary baker in her village, who notes the Flaubertian parallels, acts as narrator and filches her diaries after her death.
Simmonds's witty, graphic narrative is lighter and more current than its model, and would seem to be a natural fit for cinema. But the film loses its way almost immediately, as Fontaine shifts the main focus to Joubert's middle-aged yearnings for his pretty English neighbour. Gemma becomes almost an accessory to the comedy of the aging wannabe Lothario.
Fontaine even invents some clumsy erotic comedy for the two, including a scene in which Gemma, stung by a bee and told by Joubert that the venom needs to be drawn out, yells "Sucez moi!"
Joubert (played by Fabrice Luchini) is a voyeur who hogs the screen with his solemn hungry look and never lets Gemma know that his concern is less than benevolent.
His sneaking hypocrisy makes him a plausibly Flaubertian creature, although at the cost of flattening out the title character. Gemma Arterton looks fresh and appealing in her long skirts and floppy hats, but can't muster the tense dissatisfaction of Simmonds's Gemma.
Her end isn't much like Emma Bovary's, and comes just after she has written in her diary that she is "looking forward to my new life." That's a long way from "the abyss" Emma sees opening under her as she runs to poison herself.
The best film translation of Flaubert's novel remains the Chabrol version, because it tampers least and acknowledges in voice-over quotations that it can only hint at the fierce splendour of the book's language. But in the end it feels too small for the novel it represents, and somewhat unsatisfying as a film.
The hard truth is Flaubert was an exacting wordsmith whose art really doesn't transfer to visual means. His great subject was the hypocrisy of nearly everything, and it's tough to remain true to that with period-film aesthetics and the objective means of cinema.
Nonetheless, we can probably expect more film versions. Flaubert's trial for offending public morals still gives his novel a whiff of notoriety at a time when most literary scandals are about plagiarism. When Lydia Davis's English translation came out in 2010, Playboy magazine published an excerpt with a cover tag that called it "the most scandalous novel of all time."
Vincente Minnelli worked the same angle in his lavish 1949 film, which spliced scenes from the trial into Emma's story. It's the wrong reason to make a movie of the book, but it may be that there are few good reasons.
Madame Bovary plays at the Winter Garden Theatre Thursday at 4:30p.m. and at TIFF Bell Lightbox at 11:15 a.m. on Friday.