The french are currently in the grip of a new passion. Claude Chabrol's film of 'Madame Bovary" has taken the country by storm. But it has also provoked a furious Gallic row. John Whitley reports.
The smart florist's off the Champs Elysées has chosen for its summer display three modest clutches of country flowers, negligently strewn across the big window and labelled Bouquets Bovary. Round the corner, a fashionable épicerie has a special showcase of champagne and Calvados bottles inscribed cuvée Bovary. Across the river, the President's favorite bookshop is piling up the collected works of Gustave Flaubert. The French are renewing their love affair with one of their most enduring classic fictions, Flaubert)s Madame Bovary.
The catalyst for this outburst of romance is a new film of Madame Bovary which has taken the country by storm - over two million bums on fauteuils within two months of its opening. And for its director, Claude Chabrol, that film is itself the outcome of a love affair. 'I' ve been obsessed by the novel for as long as I can remember. I read it for the first time when I was 13 years and an half old - just at the moment, as it happens, that I lost my virginity.
'It during the war : I came across the book in the library of the house where I was living in the Creuse. The day after I'd started the novel, I was out in the woods with a sweet country girl, a little bit older than me. There was a lot of kissing and what was bound to happen happened. I was in ecstasy, of course, but at the same time I was in a desperate hurry to get back to the house and my book. So my obsession with the story may have something to do with the circumstances in which I first read it'.
Chabrol chuckles over his anecdote during a break in Paris from shooting a more modest project - a film of Simenon's Betty, which is typical of his fascination with the unsuspected depths of cheapo thrillers. A founder of the Nouvelle Vague group in the Fifties, he is now the dominant figure of French cinema - less wildly experimental than Jean-Luc Godard, less austere Eric Rohmer and more prolific than Louis Malle. His is the style adopted by the rising generation of directors such as Bertrand Tavernier or Claude Goretta.
Chabrol's thick spectacles and permanently furrowed brow give him the look of en elderly schoolboy swot, and he cultivates his reputation as a bon viveur. 'Always take a location job with with Chabrol' the actors say. 'The canteen has three-star cooking.' But the mask hides a demonic energy and a ferocious sense of irony that is unique among Continental directors and makes him the ideal choice to tackle Flaubert, the supreme ironist.
Chabrol started his international career 33 years ago with an influential tragi-comedy about a group of modern Madame Bovarys - the daydreaming students in Les Cousins - and the deadly dangers of unsatisfied desires have provided the motivation for the heroines of many of his films since then.
'For me,' he says, 'Flaubert's novel is a high point. It is a complete universe in which I find the essential elements of what interests me: feminine dissatisfaction in particular, and human dissatisfaction in general, insatiable love accompanied by a wonderful study of one person's hopes, desires, regrets and dreams.'
Even Sam Goldwyn would have been pushed to coin a harder-selling definition of what makes people go to the movies, and it is clear from its success that Madame Bovary has touched a popular nerve, not just in France but all over the Continent. All of a sudden, Emma has become an icon for the Nineties. In November the film will open in the United States: Britain is about the only Western country not to have arranged a distribution deal.
Of course. every Frenchman knows the story of the rich peasant's daughter from Normandy who marries a humble doctor and whose fantasies of romance and social climbing lead her to adultery. financial disaster and finally to suicide. Flaubert intended his novel to purge the 19th century passion for romantic fiction. but it has also served as a text for socialists who wish to illustrate bourgeois culpability . and for feminists intent on doing the same service for men.
But although the novel has tempted many screenwriters. all the previous eight adaptations flopped. Even the great Jean Renoir failed - his three-and-a-half hour version was slashed to a two-hour jumble by the distributors in 1933 and in 1949 Hollywood caused great hilarity by casting ]Jennifer Jones as the heroine. Such an inauspicious pedigree, says Chabrol, 'put me in a blue funk. The longer I worked in the cinema, the more convinced I became that it was completely impossible to turn the book into a film, that I would never have the nerve to do it.
'What changed my mind was that I found I was coming up to my 60th birthday, and I said to myself that if I was ever going to tackle Madame Bovary, this had to be the time. I know! that I won't go into a decline straight away, but ; my abilities aren't going to get any better. Also, you need physical strength to shoot such a big j picture. The only excuse I had left was to admit to myself - I'm not capable of making this film. So I jumped in, as one plunges into a pool so: as not to feel the cold water.'
The crucial ingredient, he says, was finding; the right actress to play Emma. 'The arrival - Isabelle Huppert was the decisive thing for me. We had already made two pictures together: I spotted her in a film called The Lacemaker . In , 1978 I cast her in Violette Nozière, and a few years (later we made Une affaire de femmes, about an amateur abortionist in the war. She has the invaluable gift of being able to convey emotional upheaval without any change of facial expression. That's very rare in actresses, but essential for Madame Bovary, and I came to recognise) ,that she would be ideal for the part. She gives the impression of actually being Emma.'
Once he had his star, says Chabrol, the film came easily. 'I sat down and wrote the scenario in five months. I realised straight away that I would have to make radical cuts. I took out the first quarter of the book, before Emma meets and marries Charles, and I also cut everything after her death - as you can see, I sliced right down to the bone. I used a technique that I learned from David Lean after he had filmed Oliver Twist and Great Expectation so wonderfully. David Lean said: "I shot the things that I remembered after re-reading the book: the things that I could repeat from memory ." That's how I did it too. With one difference: Flaubert's book is a lot shorter than the novels of Dickens, and I had re-read it 36 times.
'I was delighted to find I could stick very closely to Flaubert's own rhythm in the novel he was a very visual writer. He fragments his text in a theatrical way that is very similar to a scenario. There was no need to adapt the novel everything was already there, down to the last detail. Often it was enough just to turn his narrative phrases into dialogue.
'Flaubert had a cinematographic mind. I am sure that he would have hurled himself on a movie camera if it had existed in his time. Usually, when you look closely at a book by a great novelist, it's impossible to work out where exactly the characters are or what they're doing. But with Flaubert it is a problem that hardly ever arises: one can work out to the nearest centimetre the number of steps that a character needs to get from the window to the door and the time it takes. The requirements of the production are already in the text.'
This was only the second costume picture Chabrol had made and he was determined that it should be 'an exact reproduction of the period. l was lucky enough to be able to use many of the same locations as the novel - Rouen and the forest of Argueil. Lyons-la-Foret stood in for Yonville and we transformed the town, taking out the cars and the television aerials. 1 had 300 people dressed in period costume. The trick is to obtain accuracy in the detail without making an issue of it: you must never let the camera say, "Look how well it's done."
Huppert, a small, tense redhead of 38, has found the experience of impersonating the heroine with , r whom millions of magazine readers r identify almost too much for her equilibrium. When the film came : out in Paris, she was playing Isabella in a stage production of Measure for Measure, but the endless demands as to whether or not she was Emma Bovary quickly drove her out of the capital. 'When I took on the part I asked myself if I should say, like Flaubert, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi!" And I felt quite the contrary , that I needed to say, " Madame Bovary, ce n'est pas moi!" I find that sort of identification with a part pretty suspect- anyway,' she declared before going underground.
'I've been told so often that it was such a perfect part for me that I was a bit suspicious of it - I'm not all that certain that I want to be Emma Bovary. Emotionally, I think I am able to feel dose to Emma, but in fact what I had to do was to create this provincial, lower-middle-class doctor's wife, more sentimental than intelligent, fairly egotistical, a little idealistic and not without affectation. Of course, since she is an archetype, and since thousands of women have recognised themselves in her, ir's likely that her enthusiasms, her emotions, her dreaminess, her wanderings, her sharpness, her taste for life, her despair would find some echo in me.' It is a measure of the impact other performance that the stress should have got to Huppert. With 45 films to her credit, she is used to controversy. She comes from a~ theatrical family, was on the stage by the age of 14, and had enough resilience to cope with the storm over the making of Heaven's Gate, in which she played a brothel-keeper. But as Chabrol says, , Madame Bovary is, above all, the story of Emma, and I particularly wanted to stop people from identifying with her husband, Charles. Men have a problem identifying themselves with Emma, and it was vital to make an effort to help them to do so.'
A viewing of the film suggests that he has gone too far in his efforts, and ended by seeing the 19th century entirely from Emma's viewpoint. The film certainly confirms Huppert's star quality " - she dominates every frame. But this has the unfortunate effect of also making her dominate the society of wich she is supposed to be the victim. The tight focus on Emma has set off one of those full-blown Gallic intellectual rows: 'To allow the audience to identify so much with Emma Bovary is to encourage them to follow her dreams of bourgeois romance,' one panjandrum at the Culture Ministry told me. 'I find it deplorable that a cineaste like M. Chabrol should ignore the very dear socialist orientation of Flaubert' s novel. It Villi result in a severe outbreak of Bovarysme.'
This is not a nasty form of botulism, but the clinical definition of Emma's malady - the mistaking of her dreams for reality . And the functionary has a point, however pompously he makes it: there does seem to be a clear shift of popular style in France towards a hazy romantism. Two of the most popular films in France recently have been full-blooded costume dramas: Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Cyrano de Bergerac and now Bovary .
After the revolutionary excesses of 1989, the current best-seller lists are stuffed with books set in the post-Napoleonic age of bourgeois-comfort. And some stylists are talking about replacing the hard edged mode retro with a crinoliney, 19th century look, a sort of Calvados-soaked Laura Ashley.
'It's nonsense to claim that there has been an increase in Bovarysme,' argues Chabrol, 'and I certainly hope that there isn't going to be a revival of romanticism. That is exactly what the film and the book are against. Flaubert was writing a sort of pamphlet to shake people out of the fantasies they absorbed from 19th-century novels - Chateaubriand or Walter Scott. He hated Bovarysme and, for myself, Emma is everything I detest: both a romantic and a fanatic.
'Of course the world full of Madame Bovarys - of both sexes. Look at half our politicians, who are so convinced they have a national destiny that they can't see themselves as they really are: your Mrs Thatcher doesn't seem to have been completely immune to that belief. 'But it missing the point to say that is the fault of my film. If there a tendency towards escapism nowadays, then it all the more important to make a positive and combative film like Madame Bovary , to show how dangerous that can be. What I find particularly pleasing about this whole controversy is that it proves that what Flaubert was writing about in 1856 of the utmost relevance for today .' .