Love, clear me of time wasted on holding on to flesh and blood

I haven't slept in a night and a half. I would really like to fall asleep before dawn. I feel incalculably stupid.

Courtesy of handful_ofdust: things women in literature have died from. I'm pretty sure "Haven't seen the sea in a long time" is one of my problems.

We are now four episodes into the second season of Person of Interest. I get that a lifetime of imprinting on weird intelligent characters and a six-month immersion in film noir and pulp fiction has left me basically the target audience for this show, but I'm just really enjoying it, all right?

A terrifying capacity for pursuing the impossible

And now we reach the review where I feel that my idiosyncratic exposure to the Western canon has finally caught up with me. I can tell you with no qualms at all that Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary (1949) is a surprisingly good movie. What I can't tell you is whether it's a good Madame Bovary.

I don't expect it to surprise anyone that the only Flaubert I've read is Salammbô (1862). In college, right after the relevant portions of Polybios. It's exotic, romantic, and Orientalist to the max, but it's the closest I've ever gotten to the Carthaginian novel I wish Tanith Lee had written. Madame Bovary is a masterpiece of realism and irony and if I ever tried it on my own time, I must have bounced like ping-pong, because I had only a cultural osmosis knowledge of the plot going into the movie. Full disclosure: I expected it to be terrible. Not that my expectations of Minnelli are ordinarily low, but I couldn't imagine how anyone could hope to film a story with that much poshlost and adultery in the days of the studio system, especially a studio as generally glossy as MGM. As far as I can tell from conversations with rushthatspeaks and derspatchel, they got away with as much as they did by a combination of narrative redirection and judicious rearrangement of plot, jettisoning a lot of the more explicit moments, introducing more symbolic ones in their place, but retaining the essential theme of a protagonist who self-destructs trying to live inside a romantic novel despite ever more banal evidence to the contrary. I'm not sure it preserves all the irony or the shifting registers of Flaubert's style, but the result is a very good anti-romance, photographed in the elegant black and white of the historical genre it undercuts and sympathetically framed by James Mason as a fictionalized but eloquent Gustave Flaubert, defending his scandalous novel before the small-minded courts of Paris. His arguments are meant not for his skeptical judges, but for the spectators beyond the screen: "I do deny that I have made any attack upon public morality . . . There are thousands of Emma Bovarys—I only had to draw from life. And there are hundreds and thousands of women who wish they were Emma Bovary, and have been saved from her fate not by virtue, but simply by lack of determination." As a preemptive strike against film censorship, it's a little disingenuous, seeing as the novel had already been heavily reworked for the approval of the Breen Office before getting anywhere near corrupting the impressionable audiences of America, but as groundwork for the film's attitude toward its antiheroine, it's essential.

Even without having seen anything like Minnelli's entire filmography, I find it very difficult not to read Madame Bovary as a bleaker, more caustic companion piece to the director's previous film, the Technicolor musical The Pirate (1948), better known around here as "Gene Kelly in hot pants." In the hothouse setting of a semi-historical Caribbean, Judy Garland's Manuela fantasizes about the beautiful, brutal pirate who will "swoop down upon [her] like a chicken hawk and carry [her] away," but when faced with a choice between Gene Kelly's Serafin, the traveling player who has been flamboyantly impersonating Manuela's impossible romantic ideal, and the actual former pirate Macoco, the corpulent, bullying mayor played by Walter Slezak, she wisely recognizes the virtues of fantasy as fantasy and chooses the actor. Reconciling with reality is never an option for Jennifer Jones' Emma Bovary. The film is structured as a series of ever more desperate attempts to realize her fantasies, a different one each time, all doomed to failure by the simple fact that life does not behave like the popular novels, romantic engravings, and magazine advertisements with which the young Emma Rouault filled her spare time and collaged the walls of her bedroom in the imaginative insulation instantly recognizable to any teenager. "We had taught her . . . to believe in Cinderella," Mason's Flaubert ruefully observes.

Her very first scenes attest to her capacity for story-making. Called out in the drenching rain to see to a broken leg on an isolated farm, Charles Bovary (Van Heflin) is so busy getting out of his soaked coat and boots and fending off the nosy criticism of visiting neighbors—"A doctor should have a beard!"—that he doesn't even register the existence of his patient's daughter. We barely see her ourselves, a slight dark girl-shape in peasant skirts and a hastily tied kerchief who quickly makes herself scarce after hearing the young doctor introduce himself with what then seems like charming modesty: "Madame, I share your doubts. May I say that my only qualifications are these, that it's a very stormy night; that I have no wife; that I am the doctor who came." Taking his leave of the Rouault household the next morning, however, he's stunned by a vision in a white flounced dress neatly finishing an omelet in a skillet over a rustic stove. She's put a checked cloth on the table that was bare the night before and set it with a vase of irises, a bowl of apples, a bottle of wine. Among the strings of garlic and drying bunches of herbs, she stands out like a fashion plate. Her dark hair is drawn back from the round, clean lines of her face and she has a rose pinned to the bodice of her dress. Charles promptly forgets about his boots and walks into a lamp. It's as gratifying a reaction as a romantic heroine could hope to produce and she presses her advantage—she's even donned perfume for the occasion and shyly asks the doctor if he likes it. His response is gauche and heartfelt, which we will come to learn are the defining characteristics of Charles Bovary: "Mademoiselle, I've come into many a farmhouse kitchen at dawn, I've smelled many smells—sour milk, children's vomit—I've never smelled perfume before." When he agrees to return the next day—to check on her father, of course—she watches him go with radiant happiness, in love already with the tall, tired stranger with his husky voice and his transparent face, in love with the act of loving. By sheer force of will and planning, she wrestled her life out of its dreary workaday into a moment of sweetness and romance. She dressed for the part, she staged the scene, and it worked perfectly. It is the first and last time reality will conform to Emma's desires.

It's not so much that the rest of the story is automatically downhill from here, although I might as well warn people with even less cultural osmosis than me that it doesn't end prettily. It's that the rest of the story is more real and from Emma's perspective that's the same thing. She could live inside her head when she was a lonely, dreamy student at the convent school, feeding her fantasies on the tropes of forbidden novels, "love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, horses ridden to death on every page, gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, always well-dressed and weeping like fountains." She could control her environment when it was a farmhouse kitchen and a lovestruck, not exactly sophisticated suitor. Once she enters the wider world, reality insists on getting its way. ( Images of beauty that never existed. These things she loved. )

I still can't tell if it's good Flaubert, but I am extraordinarily impressed with Minnelli for dressing this story like a melodramatic A-picture and nonetheless leaving, instead of three-hanky sentiment, an overwhelming impression of messiness and futility. It's a tragedy, of course, but the sad, stupid kind rather than the downfall of the glamorously doomed. Minnelli's first choice for the part of Emma Bovary was Lana Turner, but David O. Selznick insisted on Jennifer Jones—whom he would marry in the same year as the film's release—as part of a deal which included the casting of Louis Jourdan as Rodolphe and Christopher Kent as Léon. I had seen her previously only in Portrait of Jennie (1948), which I suppose I should rewatch because I can remember only that two of the supporting cast came from the original Broadway production of Finian's Rainbow; it gave me little idea of the intensity she could bring to a part, so that we don't for a second imagine that Emma is exaggerating when she cries out, in a rare address to her neglected young daughter, "Oh, Berthe, are you filled with madness, too? Are all women?" The script is beautifully symmetrical in its alternation between Emma's fantasies and their relentless frustration; despite the usual interference of the PCA, it sneaks in some touches worthy of its original author, as when Rodolphe's practiced, poetic love-talk is undercut by the rustic platitudes of a city father droning on about "the welfare of the seaman . . . sowing his seed, reaping his harvest . . . and now, we ask for manure." I have not yet worked out why I don't find this film devastating. It touches on some of the same themes as Ophüls' The Reckless Moment (1949), which wrecked me for days afterward. Maybe some of Flaubert's irony came through after all. Anyway, somebody who's actually read the book should let me know.

I slept four hours last night, which was not enough. This downward spiral brought to you by my romantic backers at Patreon.

1. "Monsieur Homais is opening his shutters. It must be one minute to nine. Monsieur Guillaumin the notary will now come out of the Lion d'Or, scratch himself, and spit . . . The town clock will now strike nine. The Hirondelle will leave for Rouen. Hippolyte will sweep the steps. Léon Dupuis will come running over the bridge, late to work again." If your brain promptly supplied the line "There goes the baker with his tray like always," join the club. I hadn't realized I needed to look for Flaubert in the DNA of Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991), in which a bookish misfit's love of fairytale romance and dissatisfaction with "this provincial life" are lavishly rewarded with the happily-ever-after of true love, "daring swordfights, magic spells, and a prince in disguise" included along the way. That's probably irony.

2. He's out of shot when he starts to read his speech, but it's painfully obvious that he's reading it—a brilliant little vocal mime by Heflin, who sounds in the moment as though he's never performed convincingly script-in-hand in his life. I feel for Charles and his social anxiety; I expect we're meant to. He's the kind of person who takes his wife to the opera to cheer her out of her depression, is dispatched between acts to get her a glass of wine for her nerves, and doesn't get two steps from the bar before he spills it down a stranger's cleavage. He always drinks too much socially; he thinks it's expected of him. He never knows the right thing to say.

3. Van Heflin's screen persona fascinates me. Even among actors who specialized in weak-willed or weirdo parts, I can't think of another leading man whom I have so often seen in tears. I'm looking forward to Joseph Losey's The Prowler (1951) in part because I've never seen him play an out-and-out heavy—he's good at isolating a character's weak spots without playing for excuses, drawing audience empathy from the simple fact of vulnerability. It took me this entire post to realize that he does exactly the same thing with Charles Bovary that Michael Emerson did with George Tesman, making a sympathetic character out of an obstacle in the plot. I know he had assistance from the screenwriters, but I can easily imagine other readings of the same lines where Emma's husband is more of a drip or a boor; where the audience doesn't care so much that he's hurt. Here, though he's sensitive enough to register his wife's unhappiness, he doesn't have the imagination to know what to do about it. From an audience perspective, it's a worse combination than if he never noticed at all.