Among other things, Emma's decline and fall is a reflection on life under Louis Philippe, the stolid "citizen king" who carried an umbrella and represented bourgeois values of paralyzing mediocrity. Chabrol evokes the period (circa 1840) obliquely but with accuracy in the story of Emma Bovary, the provincial doctor's wife who loved with adulterous abandon and acquired material goods on credit she didn't possess. All appears to be authentic: country roads, meadows, foliage, weather, coaches, costumes, houses, even the bibelots on a mantelpiece and the circumscribed wanderings of a flock of geese in a barnyard. It was filmed in Rouen and in neighboring villages and landscapes on the lower Seine. Then, without missing a beat, she switches to smug, cynical satisfaction, as Rudolf admires the letter and congratulates himself on his close escape.Claude Chabrol's "Madame Bovary" is a seemingly meticulous adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's ever-astonishing novel that, on its publication in 1857, was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the French Government for "immorality."
In a swoony, sighing voice full of noble suffering, Jackson reads his flowery letter of tears and regret, saying he loves her too much to ruin her life and her reputation. To Rudolf, Emma is just one in a long series of conquests, and he gets cold feet at the thought of being permanently responsible for her welfare and that of her child.
Jackson is especially outstanding in the scene which takes place the night before Emma plans to run off with her lover, Rudolf. Emma's unrealistic dreams (she yearns for a perfect, romantic love that will sweep her away into perpetual bliss) lead her into one affair after another, and then to financial ruin and suicide. Her reading perfectly captures the restlessness of Emma Bovary, a character perpetually dissatisfied with her solid, steady husband and bourgeois life in provincial 19th-century France. Glenda Jackson hits the mark in this superb narration of Flaubert's classic novel.
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