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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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
The script is intensely sympathetic to Emma's predicament—Minnelli's Madame Bovary is not one of the movies that indict their audience for wanting to dream in the dark. She's an imaginative, aspiring woman in an environment that allows her little output for either and channels what remains into fantasies which may be unattainable tinsel but represent for her the only available escape from the confines of her gender, class, and time. But it notices, too, how resolutely she ignores the early warning signs of reality. Charles hedges his own proposal with a clumsy concern that is already not the wordless communion of souls she always imagined must exist between a hero and heroine: "Well, there's no reason in the world why you should marry me . . . I'm easy to get along with and I'll be a good husband, but I'm—I'm not very exciting." If she feels a twinge of uncertainty in that moment, she covers it with the genre-appropriate reaction, falling into his arms and covering him with reassuring tears: "Charles, Charles, you're the handsomest, most distinguished man in all this world!" Almost at once, the disappointments begin. A village wedding is a bumptious fracas from which the newlyweds flee; a wedding night, however tastefully elided, is a bitter sensual letdown. The world beyond the Rouault farm is not a panoply of Spanish castles, Italian villas, Scotch cottages, Swiss chalets. Her husband establishes his practice in Yonville and generous celebrity clients do not come calling overnight. At the point when Flaubert-as-narrator discreetly withdraws from the narrative, the Bovary household seems firmly set on a footing of mute unhappiness. "I wish I were clever," Charles confesses to his wife as she stares stonily out over the town square, predicting to the moment when each of their neighbors will assume their daily routine, as reliable and dull as the town clock's hourly chime.1 "If I were clever, I could understand you. If I could understand you, then perhaps I could help you. I love you so much, Emma. I like that clock that strikes the hour, I like knowing today what'll happen tomorrow—I like everything, I suppose that's what's wrong with me. What do you want, Emma?" Her response is sharp with frustration with both of them: "How do I know what I want?" It's the truth. She no longer knows what will make her happy. She thought it would be marriage, rescuing her like Cinderella from the dirt and toil and indignity of the farming life she was born to, but Charles Bovary, as we were warned outright by Mason's Flaubert, is no Prince Charming. She thought it would be a house of her own, which she could make into a refined retreat from the triteness of bourgeois life, but the costs of homemaking only add to her mounting bill with the draper Lheureux (Frank Allenby, magnificent in his dry, cynical avarice) while the parties for which she painstakingly arranges musical performances and readings of Homer devolve into provincial booze-ups. She thought it would be a child, a son who could live out all the adventures his mother was denied, but she was delivered of a daughter instead, whom Charles adores and Emma can barely acknowledge. Everything that is best and brightest is always out of reach, ashes in her hand. Nothing can ever measure up to her imagination of it. And each new effort to find something fulfilling escalates both the pitch of her expectations and the pain of their frustration.
The two collide most pungently and memorably at the ball at Vaubyessard, where Emma's dreams of social success ("The only Marquis I ever met!") and Charles' fears of social humiliation ("I know some of these people—I've treated their servants") come simultaneously true. Probably I should just have written my post about this scene. If Minnelli's film were an opera—which for these nine minutes it might as well be—it would be the first-act finale: it is Emma's introduction to the high life of which she has dreamed and her last experience of uncompromised joy before we start the cascade of really bad decision-making which will define the rest of the plot; as a set piece of music, cinematography, and beautifully deployed symbolism, it's the high point of the film. When Emma Bovary arrives at Vaubyessard as a guest of the Marquis d'Andervilliers (Paul Cavanagh) who felt sorry for her after one of her failed soirées, she looks every inch the princess of her dreams, her hair in glossy ringlets, her ears glittering, her shoulders cloaked with furs which the Marquis himself removes to reveal a wildly anachronistic, superbly flattering off-the-shoulder foam of white tulle across whose bodice is embroidered a motif of birds taking flight from a bough—the final form of the flounced white dress with which she dazzled Charles in the farmhouse kitchen. Her husband gallantly has her arm, but he's hardly a fitting consort in his high stiff collar and tailcoat, self-consciously straightening his lapels with a slightly frozen smile. Her first dance is with the Marquis, an elegant promenade across the ballroom floor accentuated with graceful flickers of ladies' fans; sent off to mingle with the gentlemen, Charles drifts nervously through the billiards room, the only man in attendance wearing no gloves and the wrong kind of tie. Caught up in an hearty wave of impenetrable aristocracy, he tries to laugh at a stranger's story, finds himself holding somebody else's cue, sheepishly takes a glass of champagne from the tray offered to the man beside him and downs it in a toast he doesn't even understand. Laughing among themselves, the gentlemen drink another toast and smash their glasses in a musical hail of conspicuous consumption; a woman's fan trails through the crystals of a chiming chandelier and Emma skims on through a sprightly polka while Charles with his unsmashed glass of champagne tries to make himself disappear into the woodwork. Despite the importuning of half a dozen partners, Emma demurs when the waltz begins, but then she catches a glimpse of herself in the most elaborate of all the mirrors that recur across this story: breathless and beautiful, surmounting her froth of skirts like Aphrodite arising from the sea, her admirers arrayed around her, all concentrated within the frame of gilded cherubs like a rococo portrait. The audience sees the recognition in her reflected smile: she's finally fit into the book she belongs to. Neither she nor any of her companions is surprised when the hand that draws her to her feet and into the decadent swirl of the waltz turns out to belong to the swoonworthy Rodolphe Boulanger (Louis Jourdan, at the height of his considerable beauty). He's the romantic hero who must appear because she is the heroine, an even better success than her first impression on Charles. She doesn't know that on being told she was "some doctor's wife," her hero answered wryly, "Oh, yes. The peasant"; she looks nowhere but into his smiling face as the camera revolves vertiginously around the orbiting pair like an orrery and Miklós Rózsa's shimmering, off-kilter waltz builds to such a fever of delirious abandon that when Emma begins to faint in Rodolphe's arms, the Marquis commands his servants to smash the windows for air, so that her next circuit around the ballroom is accompanied by the extravagant percussion of shattering glass. A smaller, no less significant crash is supplied by Charles, who having drunk his way from wallflower to legless now stumbles against a footman and knocks his trayful of liqueurs to the floor—hardly an aristocratic toast. When he sights Emma, his face lights up. He calls her name. But the dance that swept her up won't let him in; he staggers from couple to couple, buffeted by the coil and countercoil of Rózsa's waltz, laughing, slipping, apologizing until finally he reels to a halt before an amused Rodolphe and a horrorstricken Emma. "Wait," he pants, "hey—I want to dance with my wife!" The orchestra doesn't even get to finish before Emma bolts from the chateau in tears. No Cinderella, she leaves behind no slipper for her prince to track her by, only her embarrassing husband who stands alone on the dance floor for a helpless minute before straightening his lapels one last time and following her out, slowly and not very steadily at all.
Nothing else in the film ever reaches the same hallucinatory heights of art and irony as this scene. I have no idea if it exists in the book; if it does, I suspect it owes the majority of its onscreen effect to Minnelli. It's not just an elegant evening with the local aristocracy, it's a Hollywood spectacle of fabulous costumes and 360° camera pans and psychologically apt music and dozens of extras and a leading man with the looks of Louis Jourdan, and as such it permanently alters Emma's relationship with her dreams. After Vaubyessard, she will no longer chase a will-o'-the-wisp known only from romantic literature and popular culture. However briefly, however disastrously dashed, she has known what it is to be the adored, alluring center of attention—the star of the story—and it is that heady rush of seduction and sophistication she will try to recapture when she allows herself to be seduced by the playboy Rodolphe or initiates an affair with the smitten clerk Léon (Christopher Kent né Alf Kjellin).
Not at once, which interests me. She has the opportunity when Rodolphe approaches her at the agricultural fair in Yonville, tantalizing her with outrageous flirtation and a little physical play behind the windows of the town hall while Charles in his capacity as town doctor sits self-conscious and sweating with the other officials on the bandstand outside.2 First she makes one last-ditch effort to save her marriage as she understands it. She can't use Charles himself as a reason not to cheat, not as he is, her dull, loyal, maladroit husband who wouldn't know how to be Byronic if you handed him a translation of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage with diagrams. "Don't you understand that I'm trying? I know you love me," she tries to explain, "I know you're good to me. Oh, I'd rather you were worthless and dashing and brutal and that you'd strike any man who looked at me!" Failing that, she wants him to perform a risky new operation, to become the Légion d'honneur-winning doctor whose wife she could take pride in being, and being the kind of mediocrity who at least knows it, Charles reacts to the suggestion with horror. Only his wife's desperate weeping persuades him otherwise. The audience, who knows equally well that the country doctor has neither the surgeon's training nor the intuitive skill to carry off a tricky procedure like the correction of a clubfoot, breathes a sigh of relief when he backs out at the last minute, throwing down his scalpel with the poignant resolution, "If I'm a blunderer, all right. But I'll not make him or anyone else the victim of my blunders." It's a compassionate position and more to the point a reality-based one; he can be respected for knowing his limitations and not wounding anyone in a deluded attempt to exceed them. To Emma, however, it's nothing more than a public admission of inadequacy. By walking away through the disappointed crowd, her husband has shamed her just as blatantly as he did with his drunken performance at Vaubyessard; once again she's branded the woman who belongs to a bumbler, a failure, a fool. She goes riding the next day with Rodolphe. Her hat and her riding crop lie abandoned on the grass, visual shorthand for decorum and control. "I love you so much, Emma—you know I love you," Charles says bravely from the foot of the stairs as she goes past him to bed, hours late for dinner, flushed and tumbled, telling him the truth with everything but her words. "I know you do," she sighs. Another disappointment. She gave bourgeois normalcy the old college try—she got married, she kept a house, she had a child. She did her best to become the wife of a famous man. But since repeated attempts at domesticity have failed to yield the kind of life that she was always told would satisfy her, an extramarital experience is the obvious next thing to try.
The trouble is that absolutely nobody in view is a lover worth the hope and risk she invests in them. Self-centered, high-strung, and insistently reality-blind as Emma may be, the men around her are even less dependable. Aristocratic Rodolphe looks made to order for "love in a Scotch cottage, love in a Swiss chalet." He's the alpha billionaire of the Second Empire, wealthy, masterful, and impossibly hot, an experienced seducer evincing every flattering sign of schoolboy infatuation. He tells Emma that she's bewitched him; he burns a drawer full of trophies from old lovers before her eyes, saving only the letters which she's written him. Even within the confines of the Code which restricts their lovemaking to kisses and suggestive metaphors, their affair is palpably erotic. But when the intensity of Emma's feelings threatens the equilibrium of an easy dalliance, he abandons her with a casual cruelty that exposes all of his romantic exceptionalism as so much pick-up artistry. Darling Emma, runs the lightly written note he leaves in lieu of their promised elopement to more exotic climes, what can one say? When you read this, I shall be on the road to Italy . . . Léon, who carried a torch for her in Yonville when he was just the notary's gawky clerk, looks like a better prospect when re-encountered at a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor in Rouen. A finely mustached dandy who makes offhand mentions of a partnership in a law firm, he looks as though he's grown into the sincere, substantial man of the world who could offer Emma both the ardor and the lifestyle to which she always wanted to be accustomed, but their relationship is consummated in a rented room whose cheapness makes Emma cry, its cracked mirror a derisive echo of the enchanted glass in which she once beheld herself the heroine of the ball. Further assignations are kept in another hotel so tackily overdecorated, it inescapably suggests a bordello, a parody of the Italian getaway. Neither of them will help when their lover's life hits its fatal wall of the financial bottom line.
Even Charles blows it at a crucial moment. When Emma comes home in the last act with a thousand-yard stare and a handkerchief pressed to her lips, the audience knows that she's just broken into Homais' pharmacy and stuffed fistfuls of arsenic down her throat like Turkish Delight; its powdery stains are still on the breast of her dress. But Charles, who has just discovered that his family is about to be evicted from their home and all their worldly goods sold at auction thanks to the accumulation of IOUs he didn't even know his wife had signed his name to, mistakes her blank-eyed fatalism for indifference in the face of his distress and slaps her to bring her to her senses. It's his one assertive, masculine gesture in the entire film and it is misplaced and cruel. Only when he sees the sharp, uncharacteristic tenderness with which she embraces their child does he realize what must be wrong. But he can't save her. Maybe it's his second-rate doctoring; I am more inclined to blame what looked like a good baker's cup of pure white arsenic. The result is one of the most unglamorous screen suicides I have seen in its era. He works over her all night and both of them look like hell. She chokes and twists on the pillows with her hair sweat-matted and her mouth contorted, screaming harshly for water, clutching at her husband for comfort and then thrusting him away in pain; Charles in his shirtsleeves is crying as he does his best to ease her, unconditionally loving and unmanly to the last.3 When the Catholic priest presses the cross to her lips in the last sacrament, it's the traditional moment of repentance and redemption, but Emma is as barely present on her deathbed as she was the night Rodolphe abandoned her, staring dully into space as her husband watches with the same shell-shocked look on his face, his eyes still wet with tears. If you want a beautiful death scene, arsenic poisoning is not the way to go. Even a sententious wrap-up by James Mason can't convince me I just saw something dignified.
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.
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.
The script is intensely sympathetic to Emma's predicament—Minnelli's Madame Bovary is not one of the movies that indict their audience for wanting to dream in the dark. She's an imaginative, aspiring woman in an environment that allows her little output for either and channels what remains into fantasies which may be unattainable tinsel but represent for her the only available escape from the confines of her gender, class, and time. But it notices, too, how resolutely she ignores the early warning signs of reality. Charles hedges his own proposal with a clumsy concern that is already not the wordless communion of souls she always imagined must exist between a hero and heroine: "Well, there's no reason in the world why you should marry me . . . I'm easy to get along with and I'll be a good husband, but I'm—I'm not very exciting." If she feels a twinge of uncertainty in that moment, she covers it with the genre-appropriate reaction, falling into his arms and covering him with reassuring tears: "Charles, Charles, you're the handsomest, most distinguished man in all this world!" Almost at once, the disappointments begin. A village wedding is a bumptious fracas from which the newlyweds flee; a wedding night, however tastefully elided, is a bitter sensual letdown. The world beyond the Rouault farm is not a panoply of Spanish castles, Italian villas, Scotch cottages, Swiss chalets. Her husband establishes his practice in Yonville and generous celebrity clients do not come calling overnight. At the point when Flaubert-as-narrator discreetly withdraws from the narrative, the Bovary household seems firmly set on a footing of mute unhappiness. "I wish I were clever," Charles confesses to his wife as she stares stonily out over the town square, predicting to the moment when each of their neighbors will assume their daily routine, as reliable and dull as the town clock's hourly chime.1 "If I were clever, I could understand you. If I could understand you, then perhaps I could help you. I love you so much, Emma. I like that clock that strikes the hour, I like knowing today what'll happen tomorrow—I like everything, I suppose that's what's wrong with me. What do you want, Emma?" Her response is sharp with frustration with both of them: "How do I know what I want?" It's the truth. She no longer knows what will make her happy. She thought it would be marriage, rescuing her like Cinderella from the dirt and toil and indignity of the farming life she was born to, but Charles Bovary, as we were warned outright by Mason's Flaubert, is no Prince Charming. She thought it would be a house of her own, which she could make into a refined retreat from the triteness of bourgeois life, but the costs of homemaking only add to her mounting bill with the draper Lheureux (Frank Allenby, magnificent in his dry, cynical avarice) while the parties for which she painstakingly arranges musical performances and readings of Homer devolve into provincial booze-ups. She thought it would be a child, a son who could live out all the adventures his mother was denied, but she was delivered of a daughter instead, whom Charles adores and Emma can barely acknowledge. Everything that is best and brightest is always out of reach, ashes in her hand. Nothing can ever measure up to her imagination of it. And each new effort to find something fulfilling escalates both the pitch of her expectations and the pain of their frustration.
The two collide most pungently and memorably at the ball at Vaubyessard, where Emma's dreams of social success ("The only Marquis I ever met!") and Charles' fears of social humiliation ("I know some of these people—I've treated their servants") come simultaneously true. Probably I should just have written my post about this scene. If Minnelli's film were an opera—which for these nine minutes it might as well be—it would be the first-act finale: it is Emma's introduction to the high life of which she has dreamed and her last experience of uncompromised joy before we start the cascade of really bad decision-making which will define the rest of the plot; as a set piece of music, cinematography, and beautifully deployed symbolism, it's the high point of the film. When Emma Bovary arrives at Vaubyessard as a guest of the Marquis d'Andervilliers (Paul Cavanagh) who felt sorry for her after one of her failed soirées, she looks every inch the princess of her dreams, her hair in glossy ringlets, her ears glittering, her shoulders cloaked with furs which the Marquis himself removes to reveal a wildly anachronistic, superbly flattering off-the-shoulder foam of white tulle across whose bodice is embroidered a motif of birds taking flight from a bough—the final form of the flounced white dress with which she dazzled Charles in the farmhouse kitchen. Her husband gallantly has her arm, but he's hardly a fitting consort in his high stiff collar and tailcoat, self-consciously straightening his lapels with a slightly frozen smile. Her first dance is with the Marquis, an elegant promenade across the ballroom floor accentuated with graceful flickers of ladies' fans; sent off to mingle with the gentlemen, Charles drifts nervously through the billiards room, the only man in attendance wearing no gloves and the wrong kind of tie. Caught up in an hearty wave of impenetrable aristocracy, he tries to laugh at a stranger's story, finds himself holding somebody else's cue, sheepishly takes a glass of champagne from the tray offered to the man beside him and downs it in a toast he doesn't even understand. Laughing among themselves, the gentlemen drink another toast and smash their glasses in a musical hail of conspicuous consumption; a woman's fan trails through the crystals of a chiming chandelier and Emma skims on through a sprightly polka while Charles with his unsmashed glass of champagne tries to make himself disappear into the woodwork. Despite the importuning of half a dozen partners, Emma demurs when the waltz begins, but then she catches a glimpse of herself in the most elaborate of all the mirrors that recur across this story: breathless and beautiful, surmounting her froth of skirts like Aphrodite arising from the sea, her admirers arrayed around her, all concentrated within the frame of gilded cherubs like a rococo portrait. The audience sees the recognition in her reflected smile: she's finally fit into the book she belongs to. Neither she nor any of her companions is surprised when the hand that draws her to her feet and into the decadent swirl of the waltz turns out to belong to the swoonworthy Rodolphe Boulanger (Louis Jourdan, at the height of his considerable beauty). He's the romantic hero who must appear because she is the heroine, an even better success than her first impression on Charles. She doesn't know that on being told she was "some doctor's wife," her hero answered wryly, "Oh, yes. The peasant"; she looks nowhere but into his smiling face as the camera revolves vertiginously around the orbiting pair like an orrery and Miklós Rózsa's shimmering, off-kilter waltz builds to such a fever of delirious abandon that when Emma begins to faint in Rodolphe's arms, the Marquis commands his servants to smash the windows for air, so that her next circuit around the ballroom is accompanied by the extravagant percussion of shattering glass. A smaller, no less significant crash is supplied by Charles, who having drunk his way from wallflower to legless now stumbles against a footman and knocks his trayful of liqueurs to the floor—hardly an aristocratic toast. When he sights Emma, his face lights up. He calls her name. But the dance that swept her up won't let him in; he staggers from couple to couple, buffeted by the coil and countercoil of Rózsa's waltz, laughing, slipping, apologizing until finally he reels to a halt before an amused Rodolphe and a horrorstricken Emma. "Wait," he pants, "hey—I want to dance with my wife!" The orchestra doesn't even get to finish before Emma bolts from the chateau in tears. No Cinderella, she leaves behind no slipper for her prince to track her by, only her embarrassing husband who stands alone on the dance floor for a helpless minute before straightening his lapels one last time and following her out, slowly and not very steadily at all.
Nothing else in the film ever reaches the same hallucinatory heights of art and irony as this scene. I have no idea if it exists in the book; if it does, I suspect it owes the majority of its onscreen effect to Minnelli. It's not just an elegant evening with the local aristocracy, it's a Hollywood spectacle of fabulous costumes and 360° camera pans and psychologically apt music and dozens of extras and a leading man with the looks of Louis Jourdan, and as such it permanently alters Emma's relationship with her dreams. After Vaubyessard, she will no longer chase a will-o'-the-wisp known only from romantic literature and popular culture. However briefly, however disastrously dashed, she has known what it is to be the adored, alluring center of attention—the star of the story—and it is that heady rush of seduction and sophistication she will try to recapture when she allows herself to be seduced by the playboy Rodolphe or initiates an affair with the smitten clerk Léon (Christopher Kent né Alf Kjellin).
Not at once, which interests me. She has the opportunity when Rodolphe approaches her at the agricultural fair in Yonville, tantalizing her with outrageous flirtation and a little physical play behind the windows of the town hall while Charles in his capacity as town doctor sits self-conscious and sweating with the other officials on the bandstand outside.2 First she makes one last-ditch effort to save her marriage as she understands it. She can't use Charles himself as a reason not to cheat, not as he is, her dull, loyal, maladroit husband who wouldn't know how to be Byronic if you handed him a translation of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage with diagrams. "Don't you understand that I'm trying? I know you love me," she tries to explain, "I know you're good to me. Oh, I'd rather you were worthless and dashing and brutal and that you'd strike any man who looked at me!" Failing that, she wants him to perform a risky new operation, to become the Légion d'honneur-winning doctor whose wife she could take pride in being, and being the kind of mediocrity who at least knows it, Charles reacts to the suggestion with horror. Only his wife's desperate weeping persuades him otherwise. The audience, who knows equally well that the country doctor has neither the surgeon's training nor the intuitive skill to carry off a tricky procedure like the correction of a clubfoot, breathes a sigh of relief when he backs out at the last minute, throwing down his scalpel with the poignant resolution, "If I'm a blunderer, all right. But I'll not make him or anyone else the victim of my blunders." It's a compassionate position and more to the point a reality-based one; he can be respected for knowing his limitations and not wounding anyone in a deluded attempt to exceed them. To Emma, however, it's nothing more than a public admission of inadequacy. By walking away through the disappointed crowd, her husband has shamed her just as blatantly as he did with his drunken performance at Vaubyessard; once again she's branded the woman who belongs to a bumbler, a failure, a fool. She goes riding the next day with Rodolphe. Her hat and her riding crop lie abandoned on the grass, visual shorthand for decorum and control. "I love you so much, Emma—you know I love you," Charles says bravely from the foot of the stairs as she goes past him to bed, hours late for dinner, flushed and tumbled, telling him the truth with everything but her words. "I know you do," she sighs. Another disappointment. She gave bourgeois normalcy the old college try—she got married, she kept a house, she had a child. She did her best to become the wife of a famous man. But since repeated attempts at domesticity have failed to yield the kind of life that she was always told would satisfy her, an extramarital experience is the obvious next thing to try.
The trouble is that absolutely nobody in view is a lover worth the hope and risk she invests in them. Self-centered, high-strung, and insistently reality-blind as Emma may be, the men around her are even less dependable. Aristocratic Rodolphe looks made to order for "love in a Scotch cottage, love in a Swiss chalet." He's the alpha billionaire of the Second Empire, wealthy, masterful, and impossibly hot, an experienced seducer evincing every flattering sign of schoolboy infatuation. He tells Emma that she's bewitched him; he burns a drawer full of trophies from old lovers before her eyes, saving only the letters which she's written him. Even within the confines of the Code which restricts their lovemaking to kisses and suggestive metaphors, their affair is palpably erotic. But when the intensity of Emma's feelings threatens the equilibrium of an easy dalliance, he abandons her with a casual cruelty that exposes all of his romantic exceptionalism as so much pick-up artistry. Darling Emma, runs the lightly written note he leaves in lieu of their promised elopement to more exotic climes, what can one say? When you read this, I shall be on the road to Italy . . . Léon, who carried a torch for her in Yonville when he was just the notary's gawky clerk, looks like a better prospect when re-encountered at a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor in Rouen. A finely mustached dandy who makes offhand mentions of a partnership in a law firm, he looks as though he's grown into the sincere, substantial man of the world who could offer Emma both the ardor and the lifestyle to which she always wanted to be accustomed, but their relationship is consummated in a rented room whose cheapness makes Emma cry, its cracked mirror a derisive echo of the enchanted glass in which she once beheld herself the heroine of the ball. Further assignations are kept in another hotel so tackily overdecorated, it inescapably suggests a bordello, a parody of the Italian getaway. Neither of them will help when their lover's life hits its fatal wall of the financial bottom line.
Even Charles blows it at a crucial moment. When Emma comes home in the last act with a thousand-yard stare and a handkerchief pressed to her lips, the audience knows that she's just broken into Homais' pharmacy and stuffed fistfuls of arsenic down her throat like Turkish Delight; its powdery stains are still on the breast of her dress. But Charles, who has just discovered that his family is about to be evicted from their home and all their worldly goods sold at auction thanks to the accumulation of IOUs he didn't even know his wife had signed his name to, mistakes her blank-eyed fatalism for indifference in the face of his distress and slaps her to bring her to her senses. It's his one assertive, masculine gesture in the entire film and it is misplaced and cruel. Only when he sees the sharp, uncharacteristic tenderness with which she embraces their child does he realize what must be wrong. But he can't save her. Maybe it's his second-rate doctoring; I am more inclined to blame what looked like a good baker's cup of pure white arsenic. The result is one of the most unglamorous screen suicides I have seen in its era. He works over her all night and both of them look like hell. She chokes and twists on the pillows with her hair sweat-matted and her mouth contorted, screaming harshly for water, clutching at her husband for comfort and then thrusting him away in pain; Charles in his shirtsleeves is crying as he does his best to ease her, unconditionally loving and unmanly to the last.3 When the Catholic priest presses the cross to her lips in the last sacrament, it's the traditional moment of repentance and redemption, but Emma is as barely present on her deathbed as she was the night Rodolphe abandoned her, staring dully into space as her husband watches with the same shell-shocked look on his face, his eyes still wet with tears. If you want a beautiful death scene, arsenic poisoning is not the way to go. Even a sententious wrap-up by James Mason can't convince me I just saw something dignified.
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.
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"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," all that quote is straight from the book. So is the Vaubyessard ball, in all its glittering glass-smashing vertigo; I don't know if Charles's part is the same, but I'd believe it. So is her suicide, prolonged and horrible and unromantic, except maybe even more so than you've described.
I don't know if it does a good job of depicting Charles -- we focused mostly on Emma -- or of the beats of the plot. And I read both Charles and Emma as sympathetic if frustrating characters, but I don't know if that's how Flaubert wanted me to see them; certainly I bridled often enough at how scathing he was about everyone who ever showed up onscreen, from protagonist to anonymous crowd, but of course I was reading only excerpted scenes and in a language where my grasp of nuance and emotional weight is a work very much in progress. But it sounds like it does a really good job with some key scenes, at any rate.
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Key scenes in the original French is miles ahead of me! I can remember what the cover of my mother's paperback edition looked like, implying that at some point I picked it up, but my memory of the word-content is nil, which strongly suggests that's about where I left it. I don't usually just forget books.
"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," all that quote is straight from the book.
Oh, cool! That's the sort of thing I can't evaluate at all.
So is her suicide, prolonged and horrible and unromantic, except maybe even more so than you've described.
I would believe it. There's only so far the Code will stretch. I'm just so used to Hollywood death scenes where the heroine appears to be dying of a surfeit of a soft-focus lighting, it really stood out for me that this one involved explicit wrenching agony and awful noises and nothing to make any of it stop.
And I read both Charles and Emma as sympathetic if frustrating characters, but I don't know if that's how Flaubert wanted me to see them
I can't answer for Flaubert, but that's how both of them come through in Minnelli's film version. I'd say a lot of the book's attitude toward the general cast is preserved as well. It's not totally jaundiced, but very few of these people come off well.
But it sounds like it does a really good job with some key scenes, at any rate.
I'm really glad to hear it! Adapting classic and popular novels has produced some of Hollywood's greatest hits, but fidelity to source material has always been an optional part of that process. When any more of it gets through than the names and the premise, I'm happy.
Thank you for the data!
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Yeah. Which as I understand it is what Flaubert was doing in prose, too -- arguing against the general tendency towards soft-focus sliding into the gentle sleep of death etc. In the book, as I recall, at the very last moment it seems as if there might be a moment of peace for her... and then an old blind caterwauling musician whom Emma had hated hearing (I think in one of her liaisons with Léon, maybe) passes under the window singing something raucously earthy, and she screams at the intrusion, and that's it, she's dead, she died in agony and grimacing horror and that's what there is.
I found what we did read interesting, and I did enjoy parts, but it didn't leave me with any real desire to read the full version. I don't know how well Flaubert really liked humanity, but I like people a lot better than his narrative voice in this book did, at any rate.
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Minnelli deletes the blind musician (I think the scene with the priest may have been a compromise-substitution: by the moment of peace, she's too far gone to notice or care), but otherwise that sounds right to me.
I don't know how well Flaubert really liked humanity, but I like people a lot better than his narrative voice in this book did, at any rate.
That's fair. I tend to steer clear of narratives that hate everybody in them.
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Thank you!
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I have not yet; I will look out for it. What about it is quintessentially Jennifer Jones?
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Oh, gosh, and Gregory Peck is so smoldery too... I admit, there is a moment in this movie when modern audiences almost always laugh, because it is so very over the top and down the other side, so to speak, but it's intended as a Serious Dramatic Event and one has to shoo the Monty Python and Mel Brooks thoughts away and accept it on its own terms.
I haven't read anything about the history of Westerns, and most of my viewing has been later, slightly-to-entirely ironic productions, but this one is kind of Peak Western.
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All right! Fine! I'm curious!
Oh, gosh, and Gregory Peck is so smoldery too...
Okay, that I have not seen very often.
I admit, there is a moment in this movie when modern audiences almost always laugh, because it is so very over the top and down the other side, so to speak, but it's intended as a Serious Dramatic Event and one has to shoo the Monty Python and Mel Brooks thoughts away and accept it on its own terms.
Fortunately, I have a very high threshold for taking things seriously. It sounds like it might come in handy for once in my life.
I haven't read anything about the history of Westerns, and most of my viewing has been later, slightly-to-entirely ironic productions, but this one is kind of Peak Western.
I don't think of myself as having seen a lot of Westerns, but I've almost certainly seen more than I think. Just probably not as many as I have other genres. I've really been catching up on my noir this year.
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Just checked to see if anyone has made a film version of my favorite Flaubert. Although Georges Méliès did a film titled The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1898), which is apparently the oldest known film based on a religious narrative, it seems to be drawn directly from hagiography instead of from the novel. Apparently there's an opera, though, which makes me feel a little better.
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Please report back if you do!
Apparently there's an opera, though, which makes me feel a little better.
Okay, that sounds amazing. I wish the current state of opera in Boston were such that I thought anyone would stage it where we could get to it any time soon.
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What I find myself musing on right now is how having your interior vision diverge from the world as other see it is disastrous regardless of what your interior vision is. I'm not thinking of cases where your brain chemistry gives you actual hallucinations; I'm thinking precisely of the sort of interior worldbuilding Emma engages in--taking props from reality and then spinning a story of how things are around them. While there are still plenty of women who share Emma's desire to be carried away by a romantic husband or lover, it's not what she fantasizes about that's her downfall, it's letting her internal storytelling become more and more divorced from what's really happening. That can happen in any situation (a person might imagine themselves to be a trenchant voice of social criticism, for example, when really they're nothing more than an Internet troll).
And it's not like there's any clear line! It's kind of like the boundary between here and faerie--it won't bear direct examination, and it keeps moving and changing.
I think as a high schooler, I resented that Emma was portrayed (or I felt she was portrayed--maybe, in fact, Flaubert was more sympathetic than I understood) as a bubblehead, and I felt that somehow femaleness was being indicted. At the time, I had a "Not all women" reaction, but now I think I'd switch it around as say "Just as many men"--because that capacity for disastrous self-dilusion is absolutely equal opportunity across the gender spectrum.
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Data point appreciated!
While there are still plenty of women who share Emma's desire to be carried away by a romantic husband or lover, it's not what she fantasizes about that's her downfall, it's letting her internal storytelling become more and more divorced from what's really happening. That can happen in any situation (a person might imagine themselves to be a trenchant voice of social criticism, for example, when really they're nothing more than an Internet troll.)
Yes, that exactly. The act of fantasizing itself isn't even the problem. It's that not knowing—or being unwilling to acknowledge—where the fantasy leaves off and facts come into play.
And it's not like there's any clear line! It's kind of like the boundary between here and faerie--it won't bear direct examination, and it keeps moving and changing.
That is a wonderful way of conceptualizing it and feels as though it says something true about faerie, too.
At the time, I had a "Not all women" reaction, but now I think I'd switch it around as say "Just as many men"--because that capacity for disastrous self-delusion is absolutely equal opportunity across the gender spectrum.
Agreed. I can see that I'll need to read Flaubert to see how he feels about his characters, but at least the film is very clear that its point is not "Those silly women and their novels!"
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Thank you for the check-in! That's good to know. I am getting the picture that this movie may be a better version of its book than audiences in 1949 had any right to expect.
Do you recommend the book itself?
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I was certainly surprised, reading your account, to recognise key scene after key scene. I wasn't expecting the agricultural fair...
Do you recommend the book itself?
It's a literary classic; who am I to recommend or not recommend? I have what I'm pretty sure is a skewed reading of it: I'm partisan for Charles Bovary, who seems to me to be the romantic hero of the piece. There's something of the cargo cult about Emma's romanticism - she looks for romantic love in appropriate settings, that Scottish cottage or Alpine idyll, it's all about the externals (I don't think this is misogyny on Flaubert's part, he claimed that the character was drawn from himself, Madame Bovary, c'est moi, though you could certainly blame her education) whereas Charles is desperately in love with his wife. She hopes the right trappings will create the feelings, whereas at the very end of the book his feelings send him towards the sort of romantic trappings she loved. Which I find touching, though it's typical of Flaubert's dark humour.
I find it an easier read than Salammbô - but we are different readers!
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I really think that's wonderful. I'm more used to classic Hollywood adaptations being in the Christmas with the Manettes line.
It's a literary classic; who am I to recommend or not recommend?
Someone whose tastes I generally trust?
whereas Charles is desperately in love with his wife. She hopes the right trappings will create the feelings, whereas at the very end of the book his feelings send him towards the sort of romantic trappings she loved. Which I find touching, though it's typical of Flaubert's dark humour.
I think you would like Van Heflin's Charles. I don't know if he's Flaubert's, but I believe him and I find him both sympathetic and painful. When Emma wishes that he were "worthless and dashing and brutal," she's describing her real husband in antithesis—hardworking and socially graceless and, indeed, desperately in love with his wife and forlornly aware that every time he reaffirms his feelings for her, it only worsens her disenchantment with him. He doesn't know why and he can't do otherwise; it isn't in him to stage a jealous scene like she describes, even though it might reawaken her impression of him as her kind of hero. He has one great moment of insight when he insists on taking a listless Emma to the opera at Rouen, correctly guessing she'll find it exciting, dramatic, transporting. (He himself is a washout on the art form, ruefully claiming that he'd really enjoy it "if it weren't for the music.") Otherwise the best he can do is keep on being himself and hope that someday it makes her happy again. In another kind of story, he would be the hero, the decent, quiet, unshowy but devoted type to whom the heroine turns after being disappointed or wounded by flashier prospects. Instead he's the husband of Madame Bovary, so he's pretty much doomed.
I find it an easier read than Salammbô - but we are different readers!
These things happen!
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Thankyou. I'm blushing...
Yes, it sounds like a film worth seeking out.
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I regret that I am not the person to write the now inevitable crossover.
That is something Disney inserted, which isn't present at all in the original stories (that I know)
Not that I know, either. Among retellings, I associate bookishness most strongly with Robin McKinley's Beauty (1978), whose narrator reads Latin and Greek and initially thinks of her time with the Beast in terms of Hades and Persephone. There is an excellent library in that version also. I've always assumed someone involved in the Disney production had read it.
Belle is the good daughter, the homebody who (reading in) is probably never getting married so that she can stay with her father and keep his house for him.
You know, I was ten when I saw the movie for the first time and probably too busy identifying with the desire for a three-story library to think about the wider socioeconomics, but especially with her father being an absentminded inventor, you're probably right. Just as well for everyone things didn't work out that way. He'll have so many more resources with a castle at his disposal.
(To be fair, I don't think she would have gotten married in that town anyway. It seemed lacking in other people who read.)
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It occurred to me this morning that the Disney writers sort of shunted the negative side of Emma's romanticism onto Gaston, in that he clearly thinks of himself as the brutal-yet-dashing hero and is determined to make reality conform to his self-image. Of course he has rather more luck doing that (even though he falls, it's a dramatic villain death, not something unglamorous.)
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It's a sanitized case of acute arsenic poisoning in that no one throws up onscreen (thank you, Strong Poison), but it's pretty awful nonetheless. Definitely not one of those fragile radiant farewells.
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Yes! That counts.