Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (35 page)

Chabrol freely admits that his output, while prolific and often swift—he made a German TV version of Goethe's
Elective Affinities
in twenty-six days—has been variable in quality. “I think on the whole I prefer the films which I like and which did badly to the films I made which I dislike and which did well.” “Are there any,” I asked, “which you don't like and which also did badly?” “Oh, that happens. For a long time I thought I had made the worst film in the history of the cinema.
Folies bourgeoises.
Dreadful. But then I saw Joshua Logan's
Fanny,
an American adaptation of Pagnol, with Charles Boyer, Horst Buchholz, Maurice Chevalier, and Leslie Caron. Then I knew I had not made the worst film in the world.”

Madame Bovary,
of which Chabrol is properly proud, was filmed at Lyons-la-Forêt, a spruce little town in the Eure bristling with antique-dealers and guard-dog notices. There is a certain misconceived rivalry between Lyons-la-Forêt and Ry as to which was the “real” Yonville of Flaubert's novel. Chabrol favoured Lyons, partly on grounds of topographical plausibility (which is contestable) and partly because of the shared
yon
of each name (though you could make an equal case for
Ry
being the end of Bovary). “I got myself hated by the people of Ry,” he says. “The only part I kept of Ry was the church.” The rivalry seems misconceived for two reasons: first, because the only “real” Yonville is the one Flaubert put into
Madame Bovary;
and second, given that the village is portrayed as such a steaming compost-heap of bores, prudes, hypocrites, charlatans, and know-nothings, why should anywhere want to claim itself as the original? But they do, Lyons-la-Forêt rather more smugly and successfully: it declines any overt boast, while knowing that it has the prettier face, and that its cine-geneity has landed both Renoir and Chabrol. Ry is more strident in its claims, not least because they are stronger. It is indeed just the sort of undistinguished one-street village which Flaubert had damningly in mind. In the churchyard there is a memorial tablet from the Fédération Nationale des Ecrivains de France to Delphine Couturier (later Delamare), without whom indeed. As you descend from the church you are heftily nudged by La Rôtisserie Bovary, Le Grenier Bovary (antiques), Vidéo Bovary, and Le Jardin d'Emma (flowers). (There is even a shop with the depressingly whimsical name of Rêve Ry.) The point is thoroughly made by the time you reach the village's main tourist attraction, the Museum of Automata, a collection of 500 moving models, 300 of which, on the ground floor, recreate scenes from
Madame Bovary.
The figures are a few inches high and oscillate mechanically to background music. See everyone sway, sway together at Emma's wedding! See Emma dancing at the ball! See Binet coming out of his duck-barrel! See Hippolyte having his leg sawn off! See Emma ripping off her clothes with Léon! It is all innocently naff and dangerously hilarious, perhaps the only sort of “illustration” of his novel that Flaubert, with a grim twinkle, might have blessed. In the same exhibition space you can examine a lifesize reconstruction of Homais's
pharmacie
—in fact, the
Pharmacie Jouanne Fils
—and two coachlamps which once belonged to Louis Campion, the supposed original of Rodolphe Boulanger. These souvenirs produce a curious effect. It is one thing to linger over buffed or frayed memora bilia once touched by the living hand of a great writer or artist, another to gawp at personalia which have been wrested from their original owners by the power of a work of art. Are these really Louis Campion's coachlamps? Not any more. Genius has effected their legal assignment to Rodolphe Boulanger—or Rodolphe, as his reader-friends know him. And so you stare at a real item that once belonged to an imaginary character.

According to Chabrol, the inhabitants of Lyons-la-Forêt were at first all Norman and mistrustful about the film, but are now not just reconciled but almost grateful. Chabrol's crew “improved” the village square with a fake fountain; liking it, the municipality commissioned a genuine working replica for the long term. Similarly, most people in Lyons were happy to have false fronts attached to their houses and shops. There was only one recusant, an estate agent in the main square. So whenever a wide shot was required, a wagon piled high with hay would be conveniently parked to block out modern commerce. Perhaps the estate agent disapproved of the book. When Stephen Frears was making
Les Liaisons dangereuses
his location scout came across the perfect château on the borders of Brittany and the Vendée. Praise was offered, negotiations entered into, times and prices discussed, agreement reached. At the last minute, the owner enquired the name of the film. The title of Laclos's novel was uttered.
“Pas de ces cochonneries sous mon toit”
(“None of that filth beneath
my
roof”), replied the owner, and chased the money away.

The story of Emma Bovary promises cinemagoers, if not exactly
cochonneries,
at least the life and death of a transgressive woman. MGM advertised their 1949 Vincente Minnelli production with the slogan: “Whatever it is that French women have, Madame Bovary has more of it!” Stars drawn to the role have included Lila Lee, Pola Negri, Jennifer Jones, and now Isabelle Huppert. There have been American, German, Argentinian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Indian Emmas. The first French Emma was Valentine Tessier in Jean Renoir's 1933 version. “Half swan, half goose,” was Pauline Kael's unflattering description of her performance.

Certainly she was too old for the part (being in her mid-forties); worse, her style of acting was too old as well, being part Comédie Française and part tie-me-to-the-track silent-screen exaggeration. As Charles, Pierre Renoir (Jean's brother) managed the realist mode more convincingly, but was hampered by being made up to look like Flaubert himself. This produces the eerie effect of an author walking through a transmogrification of his own work, wondering what they've done to it. Apart from Hippolyte 's operation and Emma's death, there's a genteel and strangely underpowered feel to the whole enterprise; Milhaud's perky music sounds appropriate, which it shouldn't.

Before the film's release, an hour was hacked from its original three; though you can't imagine a director's cut being necessarily better—merely longer. In
My Life and My Films
Renoir pointedly makes no mention of the final product, choosing instead to describe a game called “lefoutro” (etymology: from
foutre,
to fuck) which director and stars played over convivial dinners at Lyons-la-Forêt:

A napkin folded in the shape of the male organ was placed in the middle of the dinner-table, and the rule was that it must be studiously ignored. Anyone who showed the slightest sign of being distracted by it was rapped three times over the knuckles with “lefoutro” while the following sentence was pronounced: “I saw you making advances to your neighbour. You insulted Monsieur Lefoutro. You are hereby punished and your fault is pardoned.” The guilty person could protest—“How could I have insulted Monsieur Lefoutro when I was busy cutting up my chicken?” In this case a vote was taken and the penalty doubled if the sentence was confirmed. Harmless games of this kind did more to prepare us for the next day's work than tedious discourses.

A decade later, Renoir tried to set up a Hollywood remake. His letter of 8 June 1946 to the producer Robert Hakim at RKO shows a hopeful director traducing the book (and the novelist's intentions) in order to give the project contemporary relevance and morality:

The refusal to face facts and look at life from the realistic standpoint is quite a common failing among the young girls of today. And in America particularly, if so many women jump from one divorce into another, and end by living an extremely unhappy life, it is really because, like Emma Bovary, they waste their time hunting for an impossible ideal man … I want to show … that if her [Emma's] life had been built on sounder principles, she would have been perfectly happy with her husband.

Renoir's proposal came to nothing, and it was MGM, three years later, who released the only Hollywood version of the novel. The eighteen-year-old François Truffaut saw it the following year, and pronounced it “MIND-BOGGLING!”—which is unlikely to be a compliment. Truffaut turns out to have been the silent missing link in the chain of descent from Renoir to Chabrol. In 1960, after the success of
Les 400 Coups,
Jeanne Moreau asked him to direct her in a
Madame Bovary
she also intended to produce. Truffaut turned her down. As he wrote to Renoir, “Knowing all your films almost by heart, I would not be able to stop myself from copying entire scenes, even unconsciously.” Instead, he explained, “I have another project with Jeanne … It's called
Jules et Jim.”
Moreau next approached Chabrol, who also declined; she had, as he tactfully put it to me, “certain ideas” about the role.

Three decades later, Chabrol found his Emma in Isabelle Huppert. She is a long way from Valentine Tessier, and just as far from Jennifer Jones. Where other actresses offer us a sort of pouty boredom which yet seeks to flirt with the audience, Huppert presents severity, anger, and an irritation raised to the condition of nausea. She gives Emma a lucid awareness of her own condition: “She is a victim who does not behave like a victim.” Huppert has a capacity to empty her face of expression in a way which both alarms and seduces; like Charles, we blunderingly want to make things right for her. And this harshness and frustration are in place most of the way: she has the control and seeming lack of vanity to hold back her moments of beauty to match those rare times (with Rodolphe and Léon, never with Charles) when the catching of happiness seems possible.

I asked Chabrol how he obtained this, and other carefully authentic performances (only Lheureux is a comic cut too far). He is deliberately unmystifying. “First, there is the matter of selection. I choose Flaubertians, so they won't want to change things, so they can express themselves without any
trouvailles de comédien.
I explain that my idea is to be as faithful as possible to Flaubert. They reread the book at the same time as the scenario. Isabelle claims she hadn't read
Madame Bovary
before making the film, but I remember her reading it on the set of
Violette Nozière
…” But how does he create their performances with them? “I work with actors I know, so I can feel when they're not happy. I talk to them before—if they go wrong I have dinner with them and then it goes all right the next day.” So what sort of things do they discuss? “Well, Isabelle thinks that one of her profiles is better than the other—I never know which. She was worried that fidelity to Flaubert might conflict with her better side. So I let her have her good profile. The thing about actors is that they must be free yet protected. I never understand those who direct in terms of hours and minutes. I only show the actors the general direction, I give them a pointer. Then occasionally I make small but precise suggestions.” For instance? “Well, I might tell Isabelle to open the window more slowly.”

It sounds a hands-off technique of remarkable tact. It also sounds too good to be true. Jean-François Balmer, who played Charles, gave it a different slant. “He is someone who directs a very great deal, although when you see him on the set he never says a word, either positive or negative. He just lets the actor get on with it, stew in his own juice. But I think that he's very subtle and very controlling, because the way in which he places the camera, the way in which he chooses the focus, obliges you to be his pris-oner, to be within the frame he chooses. So in fact you have very little latitude. He catches you in a pincer movement. An agreeable one, but a pincer movement all the same.”

Chabrol's film is without argument the most faithful adaptation so far, a work of intense devotion to the text. Paradoxically, this merely emphasizes his disobedience. Every Flaubertiste knows that the novelist forbade illustration of his work; worse, he actively prohibited—from the very first year of publication—any theatrical version of
Madame Bovary.
Greater fidelity therefore presumes greater disloyalty. Chabrol's self-justification goes like this. First, Flaubert had a cinematic way of writing, both in preliminary composition—visualizing scenes in detail before writing them down—and in his annotations of movement: “The director's requirements are already integrated into the text.” Second, while the theatre is confined to a fixed point of view—that of the spectator— film operates in “a game between subjectivity and distance”; this is an exact parallel of Flaubert's prose technique, which eases fluidly between objective description and
style indirect libre.
Third, Chabrol is usefully persuaded that had Flaubert lived a century later, he would have wanted to write and direct films; thus Chabrol can consider himself as Flaubert's “technical adviser” on the project. And finally, “There is betrayal only if I invent or depart from the novel.”

Chabrol's beat-by-beat fidelity to the novel is probably unprecedented in the history of cinema. For example, he established an inventory of all the noises mentioned by Flaubert—the bird-calls, buzzing wasps, bleats, and baahs—to use as a basis for the sound-track. So there is no noise in his film which is not in the book. I was surprised that the sun always seemed to be shining— Normandy is, after all, one of the most pluviose provinces of France—and wondered if this was simple meteorological luck. Chabrol courteously directed me back to the text: “It rains very little. There is a storm signalled at the moment when Charles and Emma set off for Yonville. The characters often refer to heat, and to morning mist. Perhaps it rained in Flaubert's head.” But not in his book, so not in the film. Nor were the reasons partly economic, as I had also suspected: “We could easily have hired the
sapeurs pompiers.”
As long as they didn't try getting them from La Rosette.