“Madame Bovary”

Emma Bovary is famously recognized as one of literature’s least sympathetic heroines. Entitled and selfish, her only driving motivation is an unquenchable hunger for material wealth and passionate affairs with men upon whom she can project her naïve romantic fantasies.

Therefore, it is commendable that Sophie Barthes’ adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary makes almost no attempt to find an inauthentically disingenuous beating heart behind the novel’s difficult protagonist. After agreeing to be married off to a country doctor (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), young Emma (Mia Wasikowska) bristles at her stifling existence as the simple wife of an unremarkable man. Plied with high-class finery from local merchant Monsieur Lheureux (a perfectly oily Rhys Ifans), she delves into escapist fantasy, living far beyond her and her husband’s modest means and seducing a series of lovers (among them Ezra Miller and Logan Marshall-Green). Her spendthrift ways and overwrought romances spiral out of control as Emma chases the exciting life she feels she deserves.

Allowing actors to perform with their natural accents in a France-set story is in theory a smart choice, as it saves the actors from attempting poor French affectations. But with the mix of British and American actors, it is nearly distracting—especially in scenes between the quiet English Lloyd-Hughes and a characteristically brash Paul Giamatti as the incongruously named Monsieur Homais. But, as Emma, Wasikowska is suitably immature and indignant, playing Madame as though a child playacting in the role of a stylish well-to-do wife—which she ostensibly is, given her relative youth.

Barthes sticks close to the source material, offering a relatively faithful variation on the story. But story alone is not the reason Flaubert’s debut novel has endured as a masterwork. The story and its character are spare for a reason. Flaubert’s prose exhibits an attention to minute detail, perfectly illustrating dull French country life while sharply satirizing 19^th century affluence as an aspirational ideal. It is a situational rather than character-based skewering of provinciality—in today’s parlance, a Seinfeldian (or Curb Your Enthusiasm-esque) take on the absurd vagaries of social niceties. It’s difficult for any cinematic rendering of Madame Bovary onscreen to avoid lose this vital element of the original text. And while Barthes gamely attempts to translate Flaubert’s meticulousness to the screen—painterly and slick as it is—Madame Bovary still ends up a staid and unsuitably solemn outing.