Whatever possessed sophomore director Sophie Barthes to have a go at a story that doesn't easily lend itself to the screen?
MADAM BOVARY
Director: Sophie Barthes
Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Ezra Miller, Paul Giamatti, Rhys Ifans, Logan Marshall-Green, Olivier Gourmet, Laura Carmichael
Rating: (M)
Two stars (out of five)
Gustave Flaubert's novel succeeded precisely because of the nuances and precise nature of his prose, something that has confounded anyone who has tried to visualise this since it was first attempted in 1932.
Schooled in a convent and married off to a country doctor, Emma Bovary (Mia Wasikowska) quickly becomes disenchanted with her privileged housebound existence.
It's not long before her marriage gets complicated with adulterous affairs and out-of-control spending.
Apart from Rhys Ifans as scurrilous Monsieur Lheureux and Paul Giamatti reprising his role as Brian Wilson's manipulative psychologist in Love and Mercy, there isn't much to rave about.
Logan Marshall-Green as the Marquis, Bovary's first extramarital affair, looks like an Italian footballer and performs like one.
Ezra Miller as Emma's second lover looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights.
Given that the plot revolves around illicit encounters, it's also really odd that the sex scenes are tiptoed about in such tepid fashion.
The hard-working and underappreciated Charles Bovary (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) is just too wet around the ears to take seriously.
Some scenes are lost in the gloom of 19th-century Normandy, but that is the only intrigue here.
If tedium is the primary objective, then Madam Bovary is spot-on.
