The original bored housewife
Sophie Barthes pulls apart Flaubert’s classic
Sophie Barthes was at first completely uninterested in making a film adaptation of Madame Bovary.
Her reluctance is understandable: Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel is often held up as one of the greatest — if not the greatest — of all time, and onscreen versions have typically faltered. “Many have tried,” Barthes confirms over the phone from London, “and it is a very hard novel to film. My agent was insisting that I read the script, and I really liked the take on it. I liked that she was so young, and it was very concentrated. I always loved Flaubert. So I decided to try. Filmmakers want to get out of our comfort zone after all.”
The resulting adaptation, which stars Mia Wasikowska as the titular Emma Bovary, opens July 3. It’s a condensed version of Flaubert’s classic — and, at the time, deeply scandalous — tale of complacency and the perils of boredom which was, for Barthes, the opportunity to explore what she calls “an iconic female character.”
“I want to tell stories about women, even if she has a monstrous side to her,” Barthes says. “(Emma Bovary) is not redeemable but she is, in all her flaws and in all her qualities, a woman who wanted to live differently. Maybe her problem is she couldn’t appre- ciate what she had.”
That said, Barthes says she hopes her Madame Bovary doesn’t come across as a cautionary tale — Bovary kills herself after a series of marital and financial indiscretions — just as she doesn’t believe it was Flaubert’s original intention to punish his heroine. The French author, Barthes reckons, was something of a feminist himself.
“Flaubert never really judges her,” she says. “I think Flaubert was an iconoclastic, anti-moralistic person. He always said he didn’t like his century because instead of being free, it was very bourgeois. So I think Madame Bovary was a letter to his time: ‘ Look how petty France is, with all its moralistic values.’ ”
A key element to Barthes’ adaptation — and, she says, a key selling point to the Bovary script — is the attention paid to its turn-of-the-century look and feel. “The journey of making the film was very satisfying,” Barthes says. “The aesthetic adventure was amazing. We spent a lot of time collecting things, trying to recreate the natural light.”
Barthes says, Bovary remains relevant despite its 19 th-century setting: no longer are women forced into corsets, but “it’s important for us to understand how we were treated and to look at today, where there’s still a lot of discrimination.”
“It’s harder to be a woman than a man,” she says. “Even when it was published, and it was a scandal, Flaubert said in every village in France there is a Madame Bovary lamenting herself in a boring marriage.” Not exactly tamping controversy, as Barthes points out.
I think Madame Bovary was a letter to his time: ‘Look how petty France is’