Madame Bovary

This is one of the better BBC historical dramas from the 1970s. Many are stagy and slow, and while this production of MADAME BOVARY is very much constrained to stay indoors, this works to advantage for this story of a woman who feels so trapped by her life and her world.

Emma Bovary is not a very sympathetic creature. She is married to a man who loves her with all his heart, who tries to give her everything she wants, is willing to ruin himself to make her happy, and she still cheats on him and remains miserable. In short, she is selfish and inconsiderate, as ugly inside as she is pretty on the outside.

Francesca Annis plays Emma. She is indeed very beautiful. As an actress she often comes across as bright and hard, flirty and flighty, but cold and self satisfied. These qualities, of course, are perfect for this character. Here she seems to be more in love with the idea of being in love than actually loving. Almost anything to break up the dismal tedium of her life and her disgust with everyone and everything in it.

It is very hard for a modern audience to feel sorry for her. Her daily trial does not include housework or drudgery, she has maids for that. She is bored because she is useless, she is useless because she is too lazy to seek something meaningful to do; she wants life to be a party, and resents it when it is not.

Tom Conti plays her devoted husband, who is completely devoid of ambition, in work or society. As an actor, Conti often seems to have just woken from a nap, and this dampness is just right for Dr. Bovary. He too is very lazy in his way, but his seems to stem from ignorance. When contrasted with Emma's willfulness, her husband seems the infinitely better of the two. Conti is really fine here as a man completely out of his depth with this racehorse of a wife.

In much the same way, while Annis is briskly carrying every scene, Conti just leans into her energy and quietly steals every one of them. A perfect pairing for these roles.

All the actors here are top notch, and the casting a bit off beat (the lovers aren't exactly dashing), which adds to the interest. The costumes, especially Emmas, are a luxurious parade of overindulgence. Absolutely beautiful. While we as an audience enjoy the parade of finery, we can also see how this wardrobe would drive even the richest man into the poorhouse. The production is topped off with a novel and lovely score of predominantly piano compositions; pretty and lilting, but melancholy and dissonant.

Don't let this one get lost in the shuffle, it is worth seeing.

All five versions standing on their own are watchable at least, though neither are as savagely biting as the classic book. This mini-series is the best of the five, the only one actually that I truly loved. The others being the excellent but too short 1934 film from Jean Renoir(who intended for it to be twice as long as it was), the very good if lacking-in-depth-and-edge(that's what the Production Code does) Vincente Minnelli film with the glorious ballroom sequence, the well-made if cold 1991 film with Isabelle Huppert and the decent 2000 version with Frances O'Connor. This mini-series is a perfect length, the book is big and very detailed and complex that wouldn't have been done complete justice in a film, and is the pacing is also just right, deliberate but never stodgy thanks to the quality of the writing and performances. The production values are very high being evocative and opulent, Emma's dresses are simply to die for, and the whole adaptation is attractively photographed, not from personal view coming across as dated at all. The music, dominated by piano, has a real melancholic beauty to it, while the writing is not just poetic and very well-written but comes the closest to capturing the book's dark edge and ironic humour(if not quite as savage or biting, not surprising seeing as the anti-clerical statements was one of the reasons for Madame Bovary's controversy) of all five adaptations of Madame Bovary put together. The story remains passionate and moving and the details and spirit of Madame Bovary also. Francesca Annis pulls off a notoriously difficult character to play- definitely in the top 10, even 5, of literary characters hardest to portray- splendidly, she is the most beautiful Emma and she is possibly at her most glamorous but she also has the right degrees of haughtiness and selfishness as well as the vulnerability of victim of own passions to her performance. Tom Conti succeeds in not making Charles bland or too much of a clown, while there are moments where Charles in the story is a dork in a way he is the most sympathetic character in the book, with Conti there is some amount of languidness but with the quiet sympathetic nature Conti also adopts you do feel for him. In fact the adaptation and the performances of Annis and Conti does a great job in making Emma and Charles identifiable when they could've easily not been, of the other four versions the only one that comes the closest is the Renoir film. The supporting cast are also right on point, especially the handsomely suave and menacingly enigmatic Rudolphe of Dennis Lill and John Cater's oily L'Heureux. The direction gives the adaptation space to resonate yet takes care not to make the drama pedestrian. Overall, wonderful on its own and as an adaptation, of the five Madame Bovary adaptations this is right at the top. 10/10 Bethany Cox