With an impressive attention to details, Ms. Searching for a happiness she can’t define, her desire to defy convention through social climbing leads to mounting debts and extra-marital affairs. Emma tries to be a wife, but she is left alone in a sexless marriage from which needlepoint and hot baths are meaningless substitutes. Respectful, quasi-faithful and somber, if somewhat less than invigorating, the story quickly glosses over Emma’s emergence from a strict convent education with no life experience, forced by her farmer father into an arranged marriage to dull Charles Bovary, a handsome but poor village doctor with no ambition (played by the excellent English actor Henry Lloyd-Hughes). The rest is all flashbacks, but more than a century and a half after it first scandalized the world, Madame Bovary is still a devastating story indeed. Of course, she is not helped by writer-director Sophie Barthes, whose adaptation opens with Emma swallowing the arsenic before she even gets a chance to tell her story. Her Emma is little more than a self-contained 21st century teenager unpersuasively acting out a self-deluded 19th century tragedienne. The new Madame Bovary is Mia Wasikowska, a talented girl who lacks the maturity, neurotic self-destructiveness or throbbing sexual force of Jennifer Jones.
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