Madame Bovary (2015)

As with the novel, I found the most recent film adaptation of Madame Bovary, directed by Sophie Barthes, to be a mostly tedious disappointment. Barthes has essentially made a film about one of the most unpleasant women I've come across lately.

As one might expect, Barthes trims the novel by taking out the stuff that deals with Charles Bovary, the country doctor who married Emma. In the book, he first sees her when he tends to her father's broken leg, but in the film she is in a convent and we don't know how they met. Before the ceremony she talks to herself, hoping that "he's the one." Of course he won't be.

Charles, in this film, played by Henry Lloyd-Hughes, is pretty much a zero, but he is good to Emma. She becomes restrained by country life and wants to go to the city, even as she continues to by finer and finer things, urged on by the local merchant, played with oily charm by Rhys Ifan.

Eventually she has an affair with a dashing Marquis, Logan Marshall-Green, but he grows tired of her clinginess. The same happens when she takes up with a young law clerk (Ezra Miller), but when she starts showing up his work he gives her the boot. So then she takes poison and dies, relieving us all.

After seeing this film I'm not sure why Barthes made it. You would think a 21st-century adaptation of a 19th-century work would look at modern perspectives, or at least a feminist one, but the script has made Emma into a needy, spoiled woman. She ruins her marriage by getting deep in debt to Ifans and carrying on with two men, while treating a man who loves her like crap.

Mia Wasikowska is Emma, and she's pretty uninteresting (and sounds a lot like Claire Danes). There is a melange of accents--Wasikowska is an Australian actress doing an American accent playing a French woman, while Lloyd-Hughes has a British accent. In the beginning of the film the nuns speak French. Couldn't they have settled on one accent for everyone?

The costumes are lovely, as is the photography by Andrij Parekh, but this Madame Bovary is a total misfire.