Madame Bovary (Version by Minnelli)

Northanger Abbey, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary

Above right: the cover design for the Penguin Classics edition of Flaubert's debut novel Madame Bovary as released in North America and the UK — the "definitive" edition of the novel published in 1857, which source text is also used in the above left Folio Classique edition in France. I love both editions' covers and find them appropriate to Flaubert's story at hand, but for me the detail from Corot's painting represents how Emma Bovary 'should' be depicted.

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Of the Corot painting there exudes if not the smell of dung, then a whiff of sour, of sweat: in the hollows of her moist pits a cheap eau de Cologne rings the olfactory system, and as we compare this to, say, the Pierre-Auguste Renoir ensorcelled in his paintings' portrait technique, so here does Minnelli's interaction with the film's adaptations by Jean Renoir, Claude Chabrol, et al, really underscores the difference of one another as the watch's novels inhabit the novel. Lost or confused narcissism of Emma in the mirrors, hers indeed a fiction of the kind she has dropped by into dizzying ballrooms (or a kind of space) once twice and many. Jennifer Jones, Louis Jourdan, et al, resemble ghosts inhabiting the novel.

The final page delivers one of the most shattering diminutions, foreseen in the final passage of a key earlier chapter: "madame Bovary était enceinte." As for the truly final lines of the book, I'm reminded of the brilliant deflation in Thackeray's and Kubrick's Barry Lyndon regarding the Croix d'Honneur.

Framed by the biographical detail of Flaubert's court trial fighting obscenity charges brought against Madame Bovary, I must stress the excellence (on the part of Minnelli and the production, or of Gustave Flaubert's presumed 'dashing' calculation for the setting) of James Mason, toupéed for trial, all odds plucked from the fishtank for the benefit of mankind. •

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Other writings at Cinemasparagus on the films of Vincente Minnelli:

Cabin in the Sky [1943]

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