Pretty But Troubled: 'Madame Bovary' Reviewed

While the most recent adaptation of Madame Bovary is no doubt pretty, director Sophie Barthes' take on the classic Flaubert novel doesn't quite feel like anything more than a bookish period piece. The dialogue is too flowery, the performances are mixed at best, and the film appears to be addicted to swooning over its delicate piano soundtrack.

For those unfamiliar with the story, it's pretty simple. A free-spirited girl (played here by Mia Wasikowska) is married off to a doctor in provincial France only to find that life with her new husband isn't as exciting as she thought it'd be. To combat her boredom and tend her passions, she spends lavishly on dresses, sleeps with other men and generally bemoans her situation before everything in her life implodes into a nightmare. The main takeaway, from this film at least, is that being a girl in this society was no fairytale.

Indeed, Barthes has her lens on the plight of women – all women -- in this project. So often in the background, groups of girls or old ladies are seen carrying firewood or doing laundry in the river. Their lives appear in stark contrast to that of the rich protagonist, yet there's this general sense of injustice that emanates from the film. It's a worthy concept to explore, but the rest of Madame Bovary is just so unstable.

Performances, especially, are hit-or-miss. Some actors, like Ezra Miller, who plays the young romantic Leon Dupuis, just can't deal with the film's dialogue, which is at times laughably literary. And while Wasikowska is able to explode on camera as Madame Bovery, she can't carry the film on that rage alone. She lacks the charisma to make her iconic character's passion radiate. As such, her quiet suffering looks a little too much like pouting, and that betrays the entire idea of the movie being about struggles of women in a society that objectifies them. Instead, we're just treated to watching a pretty, unlikable woman die of boredom.

Madame Bovary is playing at the St. Anthony Main Theatre.