Forgive me if I start with a bit of editorialising, but I just have to say it: the first chapter of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary contains my favourite sentence in any book, ever. It's the bit where Flaubert introduces us to the small market town of Yonville l'Abbaye, a place four times the size of the village where Dr Bovary and his much younger wife Emma were recently married and thus, he hopes, lively enough to cheer her up. "The street (the only street), the length of a gunshot and lined with a few shops, stopped short where the road turned." The bleakness of that "length of a gunshot"! It makes you think that to shoot anyone as they came round that bend would be to do them a kindness.
There is a fair serve of bleakness in Madame Bovary, Sophie Barthes' English-language adaptation of Flaubert's 1857 classic: too much for many online critics who didn't like the fact that it makes Normandy look so damp and muddy, but probably not enough for me. Taking on a book with Madame Bovary's enduring clout is bound to be risky, given that the text has already defeated filmmakers of the calibre of Claude Chabrol, Jean Renoir and Vincente Minnelli; the relatively inexperienced Barthes says her first instinct when her agent gave her Felipe Marino's script adaptation was to say no. "But then I was sort of torn, because I love this novel – it has been very dear to me – and I really liked this take on it, which was so different from other adaptations."
Flaubert drew on two real-life scandal stories to write his own tale of a selfish, solitary provincial wife whose longing for excitement takes her to the brink of financial and social ruin. The better known was the adultery and subsequent suicide of Delphine Delamare; the second was Louise Pradier, who bankrupted herself with shopping. Madame Bovary's plot consisted, according to one severe reviewer of the most recent Penguin translation, of "adding one vain, selfish act to another".
Flaubert chips away at her over a decade, observing with rigorous precision her convent girl's dreams of happy marriage dissolve in the dullness of life with Charles Bovary and then of guiltily loveless motherhood. She wants to be a good wife; her seducer, the predatory Marquis d'Andervilliers, must wear her down slowly, as does the local merchant of expensive fripperies, M. Lheureux. In this film version, time is telescoped: Emma is always young and impatient.
Charles Bovary (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) and Emma Bovary (Mia Wasikowska) in Madame Bovary.
"It is only a couple of years and I like that," says Barthes. "That she was just coming out of the convent, she was prepared to be this perfect wife, that she didn't have a child – I think the relationship with the child would be almost another film, you can't just brush it away in a few scenes of her mistreating her daughter – and instead stick to characters who in the book are actually less developed like Lheureux." Moving the draper – played by Rhys Ifans, sounding distinctly Welsh and as robustly cunning as a pantomime villain – to somewhere near centre stage also effectively shifts the focus of Emma's disgrace away from her infidelities. Julian Barnes calls Madame Bovary "the first shopping and f---ing novel"; Barthes makes it much more about the shopping.
"Yes, it is about consumerism," Barthes agrees. "Flaubert was extraordinary for that, he envisioned what it would mean to women and society in general." It is one reason that Emma Bovary feels like a modern woman, even if she does have a lady's maid and puts her baby out to a wet nurse: her compulsive sprees effectively prefigure our own age of weekly clothes purchases, credit-card max-outs and glossy supplements full of aspirational couches. Mia Wasikowska plays her with an American accent, giving the story an interesting cultural twist; as one critic observed, "Emma's ennui becomes the baying whine of a valley girl."
"I went through the 2007 crash in New York," Barthes says. "When I arrived to study at Columbia University, I was sent nine credit cards. Nine! As a student in France I never had a credit card at all, you know. Everyone I knew came out of film school with so much debt, which means you are caught in the system: you have to service the debt on this plastic abstraction. So for me, that was the theme. Everyone in the film has a sort of neurosis, I would say – they are French! – but for both Emma and Lheureux it is their relationship to money." For Lheureux, their dealings are a kind of rape. "He takes pleasure in her demise; he is a sadist. And he is going to continue to do the same thing to other young women."
Emma Bovary is often described as an unlikeable character; while her fellow adulteress Anna Karenina is tragic, Emma is seen as hard, shallow and self-obsessed. But is she so unsympathetic? At one point, unable to stop weeping – she is literally bored to tears – she tries to consult the local padre. He gives her short shrift. Anyone with food, drink and a warm fire has all she needs, he tells her; many of the peasant women to whom he ministers have none of these things. And "is it really so awful?" responded one (female) critic when the film was shown at the Telluride Film Festival last year. "Listening to the doctor's leech stories over the supper table after a day shagging your way through the village doesn't seem too tough a draw. I'm with the priest."
Jennifer Jones in Vincente Minnelli's 1949 adaptation of Madame Bovary.
Yet Emma Bovary's malaise is exactly that described a century later by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. Emma comes from a farm where she had to do her share; now, replete with maid and cook, she is reduced to pursuing a lady's diversions – music, drawing, embroidery – while not being very good at any of them. Her husband's conversation is, in Flaubert's memorable phrase, "flat as a pavement". The town is too small to provide a social circle. She reads, but only sensational trash – Fifty Shades, anyone? – as her depression erodes her ability to concentrate on anything better.
"It was interesting, this view that you could be well read and well educated but then you don't have the tools to survive," says Barthes. "And consider what those women did: they were stuck in a house with nothing to do but have babies and be at the service of their husbands. Politically, people could say well, what is her problem? They are the problems of the rich. But I don't think so. These are existential problems."
Flaubert, who was said to have once declared that Emma Bovary was him, wrote in his correspondence that Emma's trouble was that she had no creative outlet; if she had been a writer or a real painter she would have had something to sustain an inner life. Wasikowska has been critically praised for resolutely playing her as unsympathetic, but she told Indiewire that she found even her character's worst deeds at least understandable. "Reality wasn't what she expected. She felt like she was never able to learn or grow," she said. "I think it's really sad when people can't fully realise experiences and feelings in their minds." The truly curious thing about Emma Bovary is that, even as we ride feminism's supposed fourth wave, she can still make other people so angry.
Madame Bovary is screening now.