I have no idea what the point of this movie was.
I assume it's meant to be some sort of literary joke, but it's lost on me. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I'm very open to the suggestion that the problem is not actually on my side... The movie makers seem to have felt "Madam Bovary, that's about adultery isn't it? So let's create a movie about adultery". Which seems an astonishingly shallow and simple-minded reading of the book. I guess we all read into books what we wish, but to me the interesting element of Madame Bovary is not the adultery, a more or less universal fact of life; it's the elements that were specific to the early 19th C, in particular the combination of
It's the debt (and its causes) that to me define the book, and there's none of that (or proxies for it) in the movie. There's area few silly lines about debt that mean nothing, either in context (certainly no-one in the movie is having any sort of financial troubles) or in terms of plot.
So we're left with a vapid story about a very attractive but dumb woman who has a stupid affair then dies by accident. What am I missing?
I'm not against updates of classic literature; something like Emma->Clueless can be interesting when done well, especially with an attempt to translate the concerns of one era to the concerns of another. But I see none of that here.
I assume it's meant to be some sort of literary joke, but it's lost on me. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I'm very open to the suggestion that the problem is not actually on my side... The movie makers seem to have felt "Madam Bovary, that's about adultery isn't it? So let's create a movie about adultery". Which seems an astonishingly shallow and simple-minded reading of the book. I guess we all read into books what we wish, but to me the interesting element of Madame Bovary is not the adultery, a more or less universal fact of life; it's the elements that were specific to the early 19th C, in particular the combination of
- enough popular literature and education to give people reasons to dream about alternative lifestyles
- things that could be bought to decorate a middle class home well
- but the cost of those things being substantial relative to middle class incomes
It's the debt (and its causes) that to me define the book, and there's none of that (or proxies for it) in the movie. There's area few silly lines about debt that mean nothing, either in context (certainly no-one in the movie is having any sort of financial troubles) or in terms of plot.
So we're left with a vapid story about a very attractive but dumb woman who has a stupid affair then dies by accident. What am I missing?
I'm not against updates of classic literature; something like Emma->Clueless can be interesting when done well, especially with an attempt to translate the concerns of one era to the concerns of another. But I see none of that here.