Critics reviews

Chabrol's long-delayed adaptation of Flaubert's novel is as suffocating as its heroine's predicament... A classical art movie saturated with Chabrol's dark romantic pessimism.

Chabrol has said he tried to make a film that Flaubert could have made himself. That was never on the cards: the relationship between audience and screen is so much more passive than the one between reader and book, which matters most when the book is analytical, sour and self-conscious. But Chabrol's film is a labour of love, and it's hardly his fault that the eye is not a part of the mind.

Chabrol is certainly true to Flaubert, but one is left at the end of his relentless, even oppressive rendition wondering: what is the point of retelling this grim tale in the context of today's world?

Director-screenwriter Chabrol allows Flaubert's story to stand on its own, but the film could use more of a cinematic touch, especially since it's directed by the man once hailed as the French Hitchcock.

Flaubert's genius was that he could see Emma both from within and from without; we felt her emotions, her claustrophobia and her frustrations with her dullard husband (played here by Jean-Francois Balmer), yet at the same time saw through the cruel amorality of her rationalizations. Chabrol, on the other hand, is careful about his facts - he's studiously objective - but he can't invest them with any psychological weight.

Claude Chabrol, the French New Wave veteran, specializes in lust, greed, adultery and crimes of passion. Period films are not his specialty. 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.

Mr. Chabrol knows what he is doing. "Madame Bovary" is painstakingly realized, moving with a gradually quickening pace that becomes a terrible unstoppable surge toward disaster at the end. But because of Miss Huppert's particular screen personality, the larger part of the film plays as if it were a stately re-enactment rather than a dramatization.