Of course there is also the story of a dull marriage punctuated by passionate, adulterous love affairs.įirst published in serial form in a Parisian magazine and deemed to be the “perfect” novel, Flaubert's debut was received by both readers and critics with acclaim and admiration. The difference between Bovary and O'Hara is in how they react to misfortune, and their different styles say a great deal about the differences between France and America: Emma kills herself, while Scarlett plants potatoes.The strands woven together in Gustave Flaubert's famous, path breaking 1856 novel Madame Bovary include a provincial town in Normandy, France, a shy young doctor with an indifferent career and a lovely young woman who lives in a fantasy world based on the innumerable romantic novels she reads.

Madame Bovary is not a very good or likable character, and yet like her contemporary, the vain and selfish Scarlett O'Hara, she has become a favorite of millions of readers. She plans to be long gone when the bill comes due - she has little feeling for her husband - but when Boulanger abandons her, she is faced with the consequences of her actions. But Emma believes him and places herself deeply in debt with the local milliner for a traveling costume she cannot pay for. She is taken to the ball of a district aristocrat, and there she meets the dashing Rodolphe Boulanger ( Christophe Malavoy), who has an affair with her and promises to elope with her. Finally, something different happens in her life. Bovary moves her into town and provides her with a good house, nice clothes and mindless devotion.īut she is discontented. She does it basically to get off her father's farm. Emma, daughter of a prosperous local landowner, marries Charles Bovary, the region's doctor ( Jean-Francois Balmer). Huppert here is a first cousin to the famous character she played in Chabrol's 'Violette Noziere,' where once again a woman placed her own desires ahead of common decency. She is bored, she is discontented with her good but stupid husband, she dreams of dancing all night, she is repressing a great deal of anger but has very little insight. Huppert's key contribution to the role is a defiant passivity. But here, with Isabelle Huppert in the title role, he has made a 'Madame Bovary' that has been acclaimed in France, even though the novel was considered all but unfilmable. Claude Chabrol, the French New Wave veteran, specializes in lust, greed, adultery and crimes of passion.

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