Madame Bovary (1949)
Directed by Vincente Minnelli

Film Review

For any self-respecting admirer of the great French novel Madame Bovary, Vincente Minnelli would seem to be an unlikely choice of director for a film adaptation of Flaubert's literary masterpiece.   Everyone associates Minnelli with frivolous comedies such as Father of the Bride (1950) and lavish feel-good musicals like Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), An American in Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958).  There is no place for the sordid realities of life in Minnelli's cinema, and like the wilfully deluded heroine in Flaubert's novel, he appears to see the world as an old-fashioned romance, filled with glamour and perfumed elegance.  Yet there is also a darker side to Minnelli, which can sometimes be glimpsed in even some of his brightest films.  Like Emma Bovary, Vincente Minnelli seemed to want the world to be a fairytale romance, so there is a natural affinity between him and the ill-fated serial adulteress, which serves to make his adaptation of Flaubert's novel the best that cinema has so far given us, putting to shame other, more realist adaptations by Jean Renoir and Claude Chabrol, which fail to connect with the heroine in the way that Minnelli does so effortlessly.

Despite being heavily constrained by Hollywood's stringent censorship rules, Minnelli and his screenwriter Robert Ardrey craft an intense, melodramatic version of Madame Bovary that is both compelling and surprisingly faithful to the source novel.   The earthy realism of the novel which so scandalised French society in the 1850s, and led to the famous trial of 1857, is suppressed and replaced with a typically Minnellian gloss, which effectively reflects the delusion of the heroine, whose obsession with beauty leads her to the ugliest of outcomes.  The height of Emma's wished-for fantasy is superbly captured in the film's rightly celebrated set-piece, a magnificent ball sequence worthy of the great Max Ophüls in its opulence and the dizzying fluidity of its camerawork.

In what is arguably her greatest screen role, Jennifer Jones monopolises our attention as Emma Bovary, compelling us to identify with a character who could so easily be characterised as an egoistical nymphomaniac but who impresses us as a tragic victim of circumstances, a naive soul corrupted and ultimately destroyed by a fundamentally rotten society.  In an oeuvre replete with so many timeless masterpieces, Madame Bovary is so easily overlooked, but it is assuredly one of Vincente Minnelli's most mature and polished films, although the Flaubert purists will doubtless feel justified in turning their nose up at it as it doesn't quite grasp the essential truth that underpins one of the great works in French literature.  But do we really expect any film to do justice to Flaubert's novel?

Film Synopsis

In 1857, a book is on trial in France, charged with being an affront to public morality.  That book is 'Madame Bovary', and its author Gustave Flaubert gives an impassioned defence of his work, arguing that its heroine is not a monster, but a victim of a monstrous society.  To argue his case, Flaubert relates the events in his novel, which begins with Emma Rouault's marriage to a mediocre country doctor, Charles Bovary.  A devotee of romantic fiction, Emma is saddened when she discovers the humdrum realities of married life and seeks escape elsewhere, first through a passionate affair with a libertine aristocrat, then with a gentle romance with a young lawyer, a friend of her husband.  As she pursues her amorous escapades, Emma ratchets up a mountain of debts and when she discovers the extent of what she owes to her creditors she sees there is only one way out of her terrible predicament...