For a book that's often referred to as one of the all-time great unfilmable novels, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary has a long and storied history on the screen. It's been adapted for the cinema no less than six times, and an additional five adaptations for the small screen. The most well-received version, however, is Claude Chabrol's 1991 adapatation. It was widely praised at the Moscow International Film Festival when it debuted; it got Chabrol his first-ever Golden Globe nomination; and it was especially beloved in France — and who better to judge the success of an adaptation of one of France's greatest novels by one of France's greatest filmmakers than the French? Then again, there's always the counter-example of Jerry Lewis to argue against their taste as a nation. It's understandable why so many moviemakers have been drawn to the story of Emma Bovary; she's one of the most fully fleshed-out characters in all of fiction, entirely believable and completely three-dimensional. Her flaws run as deep as any character in modern literature, and her personality is as recognizable today as it was when the book was published in 1857. However, it's also understandable why so many adaptations of the book go astray; Flaubert's greatest strength as a writer was not his ability to draw deep and true psychological portraits — though that was an ability of his rivaled perhaps only by Dostoevski, his true power lay in his ability to realize those portraits in cool, elegant prose unparalleled by his peers. Due to the essential difference between the media of film and literature, much of that prose, and the incomparably refined descriptions and turns of phrase that made Flaubert's work so compelling, are inevitably lost in a filmed retelling. But in Claude Chabrol, Madame Bovary found perhaps the one director who truly shared the novelist's style and sensibility. Did he deliver a film worthy of the novel? Or was it just another misstep?
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