Madame Bovary
Starring: Mia Wasikowska,
Ezra Miller, Rhys ifans, Paul Giamatti, Lloyd Marshall Green
Written by: Felipe Marino (as
Rose Barreneche)
Directed by: Sophie
Barthes
118 minutes Rated M
I’m fond of the story of Madame Bovary. Gustave Flaubert’s 1856
novel is a spicy and moral tale of one woman in a world where it’s a little bit
more difficult to exist in than for most around her, she’s simply not content
to conform or to be told how to live. She is a woman with needs and her
attempts to satisfy them transcends the precepts of the time and the
expectations of her ‘class’. She’s a woman who likes men and what men and women
‘do’ for each other. If she were a bloke it would have all been fine but she
was a woman, a chattel and married to a very dull but decent man. It wasn’t
enough, it didn’t nourish the part of her that made up a yearn, the primal in
her. That yearning provides a good yarn (see what I did there?). It’s a good
book, nicely structured, dense but readable and it gives the reader much food
for thought. You will not turn the last page of this once scandalous novel and
have nothing to ponder on.
All the more disappointing then when a film version is dull
and lifeless, hollow and almost formulaic. A visually stunning work that belies
the emptiness elsewhere. It’s as though Constable or Monet did their best works
only for them to be hung in a laundry without lights. Perhaps the emotional
detachment and childish lead is giving us Madame Bovary at the National Gallery
rather than that great story, that huge sweeping novel that has such life and
spice and great characters…oh where did it all go?
Australian Mia Wasikowski rather bafflingly uses an American
accent as Emily Bovary and portrays her as petulant, pouty, sooky and I would
not have been shocked if she’d come out with a ‘whatev-ah’. Maybe she was meant
to be a woman of today somehow but that would be simply ridiculous.
Somewhat more compelling is Henry Lloyd Hughes as the dull
(or unsatisfying) Doctor Charles Bovary. His bewilderment and emotional
incapacity is convincing but necessarily dull. The tempters are played well
enough with the boyish Ezra Miller as the smitten law clerk Leon and then the
hunky Marquis is played strongly and (go for it girl) appealingly by Logan
Marshall Green. Knocking everyone out of
the park is the terrific Rhys Ifans as the con man dry-goods dealer Monsieur
Lheureux. Thank heavens for him.
So I’m not sure what the director Sophie Barthes was trying
to bring us with this re-telling of the classic. It was pretty, the costumes
were a-mazing and it was all very ordinary. It was not a great film and it was
not terribly entertaining.
Wait for the DVD and watch it either on fast forward
(stopping at the pretty scenery) or in stages. Unless you’ve had trouble
sleeping when it could just help you nod off for a missed doze.
Dull and disappointing
2 out of 5
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