I have no idea if Isabelle Huppert's Emma Bovary is a close relation to Gustave Flaubert's Emma Bovary. What I do know is that I was hugely moved by her. I felt actually like I was watching one of my close friends in a different incarnation. Emma's journey was poignant and fascinating. She seemed somewhat apart from the world, not inimical to it at all, but I guess recognising that her surroundings were somewhat arbitrary, and any role she had just that, a role. You would not exactly describe her as abundantly kind, but there seemed a complete absence of malice in her, a curiosity about life, without verging on recklessness, open-mindedness without verging on foolishness. She recognised the importance of duty without becoming a petit-bourgeois, brought up her daughter without blaming her despite her distaste for child rearing. It seemed her fate to not be satisfied for long, to be up and down, perhaps even what today we might call manic depression had a part to play. Her relationships never seemed satisfactory, and often she was wronged, particularly by Rodolphe. However I felt that she was restless enough that there would be no satisfaction. You know it's a great movie when it reminds you of someone you know, and the nuance sticks with you so long.There is also that being a romantic is a very dangerous thing to be if your powers of estimation of the other sex are faulty (I aim this comment at myself too!), or indeed if you conception of romance comes from fairy books.

It is a high valuation for this movie but I give it because of the novel of Gustave Flaubert. From now on I am talking about the novel and the parts which one can see in the movie or about their cross-points.The rise of the street business, cafeterias, agents, notary, private spaces and thoughts, secrets and frauds, modernization, science, fragmentary ethics and the fall of moral, religion, the ordinary, trivial, village life. If you want. The point from where Socrates and Voltaire felt their power of being free and their weakness of losing their goal. So, the fall of the fundamental and traditional. The question and now what? And the answer - where I am at this moment.In conclusion, if you do not want to read the book - then watch the movie.http://vihrenmitevmovies.blogspot.com/

Strangely anaemic version of Flauberts classic novel.This movie looks wonderful ,meticulously recreating a French country town in the mid-Nineteenth Centuary , but singularly fails to inject any life into its characters.The main problem is the normally excellent Isabelle Huppert's performance as the eponymous Madame B,not only does she fail to register any real emotion,far less do justice to the many facets of Flauberts creation,but at 39 ,she is,frankly, just tOo old for the role.The Film is also severely hampered by a leaden script that commits the cardinal sin of adapting a great novel,it employs the device of having a narrator read large chunks of the book.One would think that the 1974 Version of "The Great Gatsby" had amply demonstrated the folly of this approach.A voice-over reading portions of the source-novel is just not cinematic.The BBC's 2000 TV production was a much better attempt at capturing the atmosphere of the Novel as well as the complexities and contradictions of the central character.

Just finished watching this film on VHS after a long search of London libraries. Disappointed, but first the good stuff... Huppert does the soul-wrent-in-twain-through-moral-confusion well. The others in the cast are unknown to me but do a better job than on the made for TV version (BBC 2002) simply because they are French (don't live day to day with ironing boards for spines). The costuming is beautiful - this is important to twist the knife as Emma's debt becomes incommutable. The bad stuff - the direction. Or lack of it. La Ceremonie is the only Chabrol film I can remember worth seeing; this film is not as bad as the recent zzz-worth Merci pour le Chocolat... there's French filmmaking and there's unabashed pretension and that film is the latter. The continuity in Bovary is sloppy as is the sound editing (although Chabrol's brother's score's OK). The final straw is Huppert's inability to find some of the naivete that is so engaging in, say, Heaven's Gate. The latter part of the film is good - it's as if her scheming to avoid the fate she is preparing for herself increases the fall she succumbs to. But at the beginning, she's the same character... there's no preparation for a transformation. And WHY - WHY OH WHY does this production insist on white sub-titles? It's such a cheap error! 5/10... buy lots of popcorm.