Madame Bovary (Mia Wasikowska, Paul Giamatti)

[Holmes]

My review -

The latest in a long line of adaptations of the seminal novel by Gustave Flaubert, French-born director Sophie Barthes' (Cold Souls) English-language Madame Bovary is a compact and often gorgeous rendering, though definitely more of a cerebral experience than a red-hot story of sensuality and tragedy. In a rather curious misfire, Barthes opens her film at the end, with a poisoned Emma Bovary (Mia Wasikowska) racing through the forest, tightly clutching her side and then falling to the ground. It is an overly literal and revelatory way to begin a film already defined by its air of inevitable despair and doom. Then, however, an elegant and well-crafted depiction of tedious provincial life emerges, with several moments of genuine visual poetry, particularly ones contrasting Emma's increasing flamboyance with her pastoral environment and the way the disparity insulates and misguides her.

Barthes completely foregrounds the title heroine (anti-heroine?), excising the Flaubert novel's early shared focus on Charles (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), her doting, but unimaginative husband. The film sprints behind her as she ends her authoritarian education at a convent, weds, and moves to live with her husband in an out-of-the-way hamlet very far from the Paris she dreams of. Wasikowska, of whom I am an enormous fan, is dynamic in the lead role. She exhibits sympathy for her character's plight, but is also unafraid to explore her sinister side: tendencies toward greed, self-destruction, and vanity which emerge as she pursues an empty and unrealistic type of fulfillment. (It is a bit of a shame this adaptation ignores the character of Berthe, Charles and Emma's daughter, denying the star the chance to play provocative scenes of domestic malaise further complicated by maternal discontent.) The other performances are largely capable, though no one comes close to eclipsing Wasikowska. Among the peripheral cast members, Rhys Ifans is best, stealing a few scenes as a slyly malevolent fashion merchant, Monsieur Lheureux, who praises and smiles as he spins inescapable webs of debt.

B+