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Madame Bovary (TV) More at IMDbPro »

24 out of 36 people found the following review useful:
some pretty botched-up casting, 3 March 2000
Author: Lori Pieper (ljp-2) from Bronx, NY

I've got to admit that Madame Bovary isn't my one of my favorite literary works, but I've watched several adaptations nonetheless. This was a fairly intelligent attempt at adaptation, with a pretty good script, but it was ruined for me by some casting misjudgments and a misguided decision to use nudity and explicit sex.

It takes some doing to make a woman as misguided and blinkered as Emma Bovary truly sympathetic (one of my major problems with the book), and though Frances O'Connor is a good actress, she often comes across seeming merely like a spoiled brat. She seems even more so because the decision was made to have her speak out loud so many things that Emma only thinks in the book. But I think the negative impression I got of this Emma is less due to her, perhaps, then to the other cast. I think it was a major mistake to cast somebody so obviously manly and sympathetic in the role of her husband as Hugh Bonneville (in the book Charles was really a dork) and such lightweights as Greg Wise (who looks stupefied most of the time) and -- well, I've forgotten what is name was -- as Leon. You definitely have to question her preference from them over Charles.

The various explicit nude sex scenes really add nothing, and often lead us in the wrong direction. Is it merely a difference in sexual technique that makes Emma unsatisified by her husband, but satisfied by Rodolphe? You can look at these scenes for hours and never find out. By the way, what is this about Emma apparently liking rough sex (her first time with Rodolphe, when he makes her bleed). Where was THAT in the book??! But most of all it was a mistake, I think, because Emma focuses as much on romance as on sex, and these scenes completely miss that.

I was mainly disappointed in this try at the book. Beautifully photographed, though.

10 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
This movie is appropriately sexually explicit., 9 May 2008
Author: tpanebia from West Virginia (really)

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I don't think this really has a spoiler in it but I am just being careful! This is mostly a comment on commenter Lori's objections to the nudity in this version (she asks, where is there a reference to sexual techniques in the novel?), and also her objection to Rodolphe making Emma bleed during the rough sex. In fact, Flaubert suggests that Emma loses her virginity (not literally, but figuratively) to Rodolphe, not her husband Charles. By that I mean that after her wedding night, she is bored and unimpressed, while Charles is jaunty and energized the next morning. Then, after Emma has sex with Rodolphe, Flaubert notes that it is her turn to be newly energized, as she gallops around jauntily with her horse, and Rodolphe "mends his bridle", a sly figurative reference to her broken hymen, I believe. I think the bleeding suggests that Rodolphe has gone places that Charles never reached before, both sexually and emotionally for Emma.

Flaubert himself was prosecuted for writing explicit (for the day) sex scenes, as one where Emma strips naked for Leon and pounces on him, and another in which she uses words during sex (apparently "Oh God Oh God") that she previously had reserved only for prayer! Making this movie sexually explicit, therefore, is certainly in keeping with what Flaubert did.

Finally, several comments objected that this Emma wasn't very sympathetic. I don't believe Flaubert's Emma was intended to be very sympathetic. She was understandably bored and disappointed with the hand life dealt her being a woman and a peasant who was romantic at heart, and then stuck in a one-horse bourgeois backwater town with a clueless oaf for a husband. But she was selfish, dishonest, shallow, stupid and had God-awful cheesy taste in everything. This is realism, not romanticism, and Flaubert created no heroes --- just a cynic's view of real folks.

9 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
The book is much better, 5 August 2006

Author: Nico Koolsbergen from Netherlands

The book - I read it one day before I watched the film on DVD - is (as often) much better. It sounds like a cliché but it's a fact. It's difficult to understand the motives of Madame Bovary and one simply needs hundreds of pages to describe what's going on in her mind.

Of course the movie omits many details of the original story. Yet the actors who perform the personages of Bovary, Homais, Lheureux and many minor roles are cast well. However, Frances O'Connor is not a credible Madame Bovary. I think it is difficult to find a actress for this complicated character. I could not help imagining that Emma Thompson might have been a much more sympathetic and understandable Emma Bovary.

Yet I think the BBC deserves a 7 out of 10 for this attempt to represent Flaubert's masterpiece.

5 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
A tiny notch above usual costume fare.(spoiler), 13 April 2000

Author: andrew osnard (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from panama city, panama

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

David Lean's RYAN'S DAUGHTER is sublime and a masterpiece, but it is the film Emma would have made rather than Flaubert. Normally I avoid BBC costume dramas as the antithesis of everything I hold dear in terms of literature and film. Because most lassic novels are so long, they are stripped to their bare bones, like the summaries in York's notes, as if it is the plot that is important, and not the way it is told.

Further, this skeleton is weighed down by a crazed fetishisation of period detail in a quest for authenticity. As has been pointed out, these bourgeois entertainments, supposedly an antidote to 'generic' Hollywood fare, are actually more generic, in that an undisclosed standard of respectability must be continually adhered to.

Perversely, the most outstanding and inventive films of the year are adoptations of classic novels, Raul Ruiz' LE TEMPS RETROUVE, and Patricia Rozema's MANSFIELD PARK, two works which take thrilling liberties with their sources, which are unashamedly cinematic, daring to be disrespectful when needs be, which emerge from the closed world of the text to become comments on the artistic creation of that text itself, as well as the socio-political pressures that helped that creation. That is not to say they stint on period pleasures - costumes, decor etc - but these are part of the films' meaning and critique, not a stagnant end in themselves.

I only watched MADAME BOVARY because its star is MANSFIELD's beautiful Frances O'Conner, an actress in the process of becoming very great. Robbed of the freedom given to her by Rozema, her stifled sprightliness is appropriate to this story of a bored fantasist stuck in dreary, suffocatingly conventional provincial France (oh, for MOUCHETTE!). In fact, the brooding and muted production is probably appropriate too, as Emma struggles to free herself not only from social mediocrity, but filmic as well.

Too often the stage is set for a grand, moving, emotionally devastating scene - the waltz with the Vicomte (compare this with the heavenly ball in MANSFIELD); the midnight meetings with Rodolphe; the trip to the Opera etc - only to be hobbled by conventionality and a lack of daring. This is MADAME BOVARY made by Charles.

This is not to say that the film is not without merit. The script is comparitively crisp, and there is a lovely vein of humour you'd be hard pushed to find even in Flaubert - my favourite is when an initial Emma daydream is followed by a farcical falling of her father from a tree.

The visual dankness is true enough, and allows for the odd visual epiphany, such as Emma's lilac dress. There is rarely much room for acting in these things, but Hugh Bonneville is a magnificent Charles, so decent, so nice, yet so intolerable, while Eileen Atkins is perfect as the mother-in-law from hell.

What seems most odd is the religious underpinning given to Emma's ecstasies. Maybe, like Bresson, Flaubert's relentless depiction of spiritualless banality is underpinned by imminent transcendence, but if it is, I missed it. This doesn't matter, because it allows for some intriguing effects - the opening ceremony that could be either wedding, christening or funeral; the delirious reading from the Song of Solomon; the burning cross in Leon's carriage as he and Emma are about to make love. In the end, the fumbling attempts at subjective sympathy with Emma culminate in her memories living on after her death, 'realistically' impossible, giving this ending a real force. The barrel-organ leitmotifs are pretty neat too.

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