A new chapter for Madame Bovary?
If only Silence (15) ★★ lived up to its name. Martin Scorsese’s images of 17th-Century Japan are so startling – Hokusai calligraphy come to life – that the over-explicatory dialogue is like an intrusion in paradise. The dialogue belongs largely to the Fathers Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver), and how one wishes it didn’t. A pair of priests, they are said to come from Portugal, though to me they sounded as if they came from Paris, Palm Springs and northern England. Only fitting in a movie that’s all over the place. Our heroes have been sent across the water to bring home one Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson). He came East many years back with the idea of converting the locals to Christianity, before doing a Vapors and turning Japanese. Apocalypse Noh, in other words, though where Francis Ford Coppola worked a hundred variants on the strangers in a strange land theme, Scorsese offers nothing but long, despairing exchanges between Rodrigues and Garupe on the nature of faith. How do you film great literature? Just as the BBC’s Decline And Fall reminded us that it’s impossible to translate Evelyn Waugh into visual language, so a new version of
Madame Bovary (15) ★★★ might have been created to demonstrate there’s no trapping Flaubert on celluloid either. What’s needed isn’t a slavish devotion to the book but a director with the visual flair to reimagine things. Alas, Sophie Barthes’s picture begins with a shot of Emma Bovary (Mia Wasikowska) learning to walk while balancing a book on her head – an apt image for a film that never gets out from under the weight of a classic text. Treat of the week is Hard Times (TBC) ★★★★. No, not a Dickens adaptation but Walter Hill’s magnificent debut set in Thirties New Orleans. Charles Bronson is a jobless drifter who’s tempted into the Depression-era equivalent of cage-fighting by James Coburn’s luckless hustler. This is a masterclass in pulp, with a Runyonesque script, lovely location footage and sets that look like Hopper paintings. Unmissable.