Madam Bovary on film

Two prominent modern film directors have brought Emma Bovary's story to the screen--Vincente Minnelli in 1949 and, more recently, Claude Chabrol in 1992. This paper will study these two versions of Flaubert's novel and how each director employs and manipulates the medium of film to bring a work of fiction to the screen.

The films of Minnelli and Chabrol represent two radically different approaches to Flaubert's novel. In general, Minnelli tends to romanticize the story, even sentimentalize it, making Emma much more of a sympathetic heroine than seems to be the case in Flaubert's text. Much of th

Chabrol's solution to the narrative problem is much less satisfying. An unidentified narrative voice intrudes throughout the film to move the plot forward. It seems awkward and is not as clever as the narrative device employed by Minnelli. Another problem which both directors had to face was how to establish the character of Emma Bovary in a visual medium. Minnelli succeeds very well in depicting the intensely romantic character of Emma. The narrative voice of Flaubert tells us "Society taught her that the strange was beautiful, to believe in Cinderella. That the ordinary was boring." One critic writes that "Minnelli defines her visually as an alien figure, constantly ill-matched with her surroundings." (Harvey 203).

Chabrol will have none of this. He clearly follows Flaubert's graphic description of Emma's painful and ugly death from arsenic poisoning. In a powerful visual touch, he has black gore dribble from the dead Emma's mouth as Charles raises her body and embraces it. Chabrol also follows Flaubert in depicting, if only in a voice-over, the destructive effects of Emma's actions.

In the actual scene at the provincial Agricultural Fair, Rodolphe attempts to seduce Emma with a calculated appeal to her romantic ideals, while in the background a political flunky delivers an equally calculated and dishonest speech to the assembled crowd. Flaubert intertwines these two speeches so that the political speech outside acts as a savagely ironic commentary on the hypocrisy of Rodolphe's words to Emma inside one of the buildings. This scene seems made for the cinema, with its cross-cut and voice-over techniques. Indeed, both directors understand the ironic structure of Flaubert's scene and try to reproduce it visually. But both versions fail to capture the savage irony adequately. Here, for a change, Chabrol's version seems to be superior to Minnelli's, who fails to exploit Flaubert's pervasive irony. Yet the power of the irony is undercut by both directors' failure to show the audience Rodolphe's true intentions which Flaubert reveals in the scene where Rodolphe first sees her. And both directors fail to exploit the ironic climax of Flaubert's scene. As Emma yields to Rodolphe's blandishments, an old servant outside is presented with an award for many years of fidelity!

e ironic tone of the novel is lost. Minnelli also omits from his film all scenes which are not directly connected with Emma. The harsh realism and ironic social commentary which underlie Flaubert's novel are ignored for the most part. Chabrol, on the other hand, attempts to be scrupulously faithful to the text and spirit of the novel. The director claims that virtually every word of dialogue in the film was taken directly from Flaubert's text. He succeeds more than Minnelli does in conveying Flaubert's ironic depiction of the petty, hypocritical, bourgeois world in which Emma exists. Both film versions fail, I think, but for different reasons. Minnelli is the victim of his own romantic tendencies. Chabrol, by producing an overly-reverent, almost pageant-like homage to Flaubert, presents his audience with a film which is visually beautiful, yet strangely lifeless.

To underscore the imaginary romantic world which Emma creates for herself, Minnelli shows us Emma's room with its walls plastered with dramatic scenes from popular romantic novels--" a landscape of enchanted woods, engravings of rapt lovers from sentimental novels, thumbed-over copies of fashion magazines...images of beauty which never existed" (204). The room be

Some topics in this essay:
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