Madame Bovary (1933)
Directed by Jean Renoir

Film Review

When Jean Renoir was invited by producer Gaston Gallimard to direct a film adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's literary masterpiece Madame Bovary he jumped at the chance.  This was despite the fact that Renoir's previous literary adaptation - Nana (1926) - had been such a commercial disaster that it virtually bankrupted him and pretty well scuppered his hopes of remaining an independent filmmaker.  Like Nana, Renoir had wildly ambitious plans for the film - plans that, in the end, went horribly awry.  The first cut of the film ran to three and a half hours, but whilst those who saw this version were reportedly impressed by it, the director was forced by the distributors into making drastic cuts which reduced its run time to around two hours.  The result was, inevitably, another flop.

Renoir's Madame Bovary has the distinction of being the first screen interpretation of Flaubert's great novel, and whilst it has some obvious shortcomings (the editing is choppy, some of the acting painfully stilted, the narrative poorly abridged in parts), it has some appeal and presages the more important cinematic works that Renoir would go on to make in the 1930s - most notably his unpolished neo-realist melodrama Toni (1935) and scurrilous anti-bourgeois romp La Règle du jeu (1939).  In comparison with subsequent film adaptations of the book, including Vincente Minnelli's slicker 1949 Hollywood version, Renoir does not make the mistake of romanticising the fate of Flaubert's tragic heroine.  Rather, like Flaubert, he looks on her with cool detachment, so that we are forced to see her as the instrument of her own downfall - a vain, silly woman who, in an age of spiritual vacuity, is too easy a victim of bourgeois materialism.

Valentine Tessier is a typically eccentric piece of casting by Renoir for the part of Emma Bovary.  A mature actress with a near-vampish persona (not too far removed from that of Edwige Feuillère or Viviane Romance), Tessier is clearly too old and too fleshly to be convincing as the young innocent who first appears in Flaubert's novel.  In fact, her outward appearance alters not one jot in the course of the narrative, which spans a period of over a decade.  Externally, Renoir's Emma Bovary is seemingly immutable, unaffected either by the passing of the years or the series of horrible misfortunes that befall this most ludicrously quixotic of heroines.  Yet, through a remarkable performance (most likely the best of her career), Tessier manages to convey the inner transformation of her character and bring home the appalling tragedy that Flaubert paints so vividly in his novel.  There has probably never been a more authentic and believable screen portrayal of Emma Bovary.

Charles Bovary, the dull, blundering but unstintingly honourable man who should have been Emma's redeemer but ends up being an agent of her destruction, is faultlessly portrayed by the director's older brother, Pierre Renoir, the perfect down-to-earth complement to Tessier's head-in-the-clouds Emma.  In keeping with the novel, all of the male characters in the film are pretty pathetic examples of manhood, ranging from the leech-like storekeeper Monsieur Lheureux (a part that Robert Le Vigan milks with obvious relish) to the disgustingly self-centred Rodolphe (Fernand Fabre plays him as the most caddish invertebrate you can imagine).  Beloved character actors Max Dearly and Pierre Larquey add further lustre to an exemplary cast, which is assuredly the film's greatest asset, even if Renoir's mannered mise-en-scène does occasionally tend to over-accentuate the theatricality of the performances.  In some scenes, the exaggerated gestures and flat delivery of the dialogue leave the impression that Renoir is still struggling with the transition from silent to sound cinema.

It is Renoir's obvious striving for the Brechtian distancing that Gustave Flaubert achieves so brilliantly on the printed page that proves to be the film's most noticeable flaw.  It is not an approach that the director is comfortable with and the result is a piece of cinema caught somewhere between theatrical and film melodrama, the languid staginess relieved by some occasional impressionistic bursts of provincial realism, which have the perverse affect of glorifying the simple rural existence that Emma Bovary finds so detestable (but which Renoir obviously adores).  The film does not bring us sufficiently close to the protagonists so that we can fully engage with them, nor does it convey the sense of forced alienation that is so palpably rendered by Flaubert.

Renoir's muddled vision of the film (specifically his clumsy misappropriation of Flaubert's story for his own bourgeois-knocking ends) is exacerbated by his lack of maturity as a filmmaker.  His by now familiar device of placing characters at the back of the shot, glimpsed through windows and doorways, is used, a little too self-consciously, to emphasise his heroine's confinement in a world that she desperately wants to escape from. Figures of authority (clerics and men of science) are mocked, but with none of the subtlety we find in the director's later films.  There is an obvious conflict between the film that the increasingly politically conscious Renoir seems to want to make (an attack on middle-class morality with a hard contemporary resonance) and the film he was expected to deliver to his producer (a rigorously faithful reproduction of a beloved work of French literature).

It is easy to write off Renoir's Madame Bovary as a botched experiment or a too half-hearted attempt to give a popular 19th century novel a modern spin, but the fact that we can only see it today in its truncated form (the extra footage of the original three and half hour version has long been destroyed) means that we can never appreciate it as its author intended.  The experience of making the film was however to have a transformative effect on its director, evidenced by the succession of sublime cinematic marvels that immediately followed it.  No one could seriously mistake Madame Bovary for a great film, but it was an important stepping stone towards Jean Renoir's fulfilment as a filmmaker.

Film Synopsis

In the summer of 1839, Dr Charles Bovary is happy with his mundane existence as a country doctor near Rouen, married to an older woman he scarcely notices.  When his wife dies suddenly from natural causes, Bovary quickly finds a replacement in Emma Rouault, the attractive daughter of one of his wealthier patients.  Emma has difficulty adapting to her new life and soon grows weary with boredom.  Secretly she pines for the life she reads about in romantic fiction, a life of splendour and passion.  Her contempt for her husband is complete when he botches an operation to cure an unfortunate man of a club foot.  By now Emma has begun a passionate love affair with Rodolphe Boulanger, a young landowner who leads the life of a libertine.

Even though she now has a young daughter on her hands, Emma plans to elope with Rodolphe and start a new life, but her lover decides it is best to end the affair.  Heartbroken, Emma falls ill and, once recovered, tries to make good by devoting herself to charitable work.  But even now she remains prone to her romantic fantasies and soon finds a new lover in Léon Dupuis, a young lawyer.  Careless with her household expenditure, Emma scarcely notices that she has ratcheted up a fortune in debts to the draper Monsieur Lheureux.  When the latter demands eight thousand francs to settle her debts Emma has no recourse but to appeal to the generosity of her lovers - but alas they have none to give.  Having brought herself and her husband to ruin, Emma has one last romantic fantasy to enact, but this proves to be the most painful delusion of all...