Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 30-May-10
Spoiler Rating: High

Madame Bovary (1949)

Madame Bovary fits well into my series about films based on classic works of literature because it is framed as an explication and defense of the work itself. The movie opens with 19th-century author Gustave Flaubert (played by James Mason) responding to charges that he flouted morality by creating his adulterous heroine. He begins to explain her actions like an English teacher guiding a class to comprehension, and as he explains the chapters unfold on the screen.

This method of presenting the story is especially beneficial because Emma Bovary is a hard act to swallow. Whether reading or watching I am tempted to dismiss her as a drama queen and leave her to her self-destruction. Yet Mason's mellifluous voice-overs pave the way to understanding her character. Emerging from a meager childhood, young Emma (Jennifer Jones) satisfies a romantic nature by inhabiting a dream world where elegant ladies enjoy everlasting love with noble princes. This world is more real to her than her tangible surroundings, so when she meets doctor Charles Bovary (Van Heflin) she mistakes him for something he is not. After a rough country wedding he takes her to a small town where she quickly realizes that her new life is not a fairy tale. This is the first of many blows.

The constraints of gender, money, and social station chafe her. She bears a daughter after hoping for a son since males have a better chance of escaping disappointment. She frets over the neighbors' provincialism and takes great pains to dress herself and her home in what she believes are the latest styles. She tries to spruce up her husband, who is excruciatingly ordinary and knows it. Confused but adoring, he tolerates her whims without knowing that she is racking up huge debts with a smarmy merchant (Frank Allenby). Charles even considers performing complicated surgery just to appease her desire to be married to a man of renown.

During a ball at the manor of a local aristocrat (terrifically staged by director Vincente Minnelli), Emma believes she has found her dream world at last. She does not recognize that she herself would be laughably parochial were she not pretty enough to compel admiration. One beau from this evening is a wealthy playboy (Louis Jourdan) who seduces her into an affair. Their relationship follows the inevitable course when a comfortable bachelor dallies with a woman for whom he has no respect. From this debasement she sinks into another until she finally seals her doom and the downfall of her family.

The point that Mason's Flaubert tries to make is that people who commit sordid and harmful deeds are not necessarily evil, or even entirely immoral. In Emma's case, she suffers from a fatal inability to accept the world as it is in favor of a fantasy that cannot be. But this fantasy derives from ideals of beauty, so in a sense her heart is in the right place. The narrator goes a little overboard by equating his fiction with ultimate Truth, but that is pardonable in an artist whose work is challenged. The movie accomplishes his ends by inviting the viewer to grasp the reason for its heroine's actions with or without excusing them.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.