Hindsight

TCM  Madame Bovary (1949)


I must get to work, but started watching Vincent Minnelli's Madame Bovary (1949).  Have always had a painful soft spot for this movie, because the heroine, Emma is so driven but naively so as she strives for unattainable beauty missing the loveliness of life around her.  Can't help but feel I am not the only one who struggles with this.  I know many of my unhappy moments have come from ignoring the realities (not all painful) that did not fit my fantasy.  Luckily as one wonderfully ages, this seems to be less and less so; it has been for me.   This film prompted me to read Gustave Flaubert's once banned book.  Some of my favorite words from the novel show Gustave Flaubert's gift for understanding the heroine Emma's constant state of restlessness, her inability to find joy in the simple. She always strove for the fantasies that existed only in poetry and books, which I find is still such a contemporary phenomenom, as we compare ourselves to celebrities and magazine covers that photoshop 'perfection.'  Like Emma I think some of us find "the strange beautiful and the familar ugly."  The author warns near the end of the novel, “Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers." 

Vincent Minnelli's Madame Bovary is simply a phenomenal film that captures the theme of fantasy I mention above but also explores another themes from the  book, how words are often difficult in explaining human feelings and desires.  Watch this ballroom scene, as Minnelli's visuals tease out that space between what we say and what we feel.  Minnelli does this through his use of framing, camera movement, editing, music.  This film touches that spot,  breaking through the barriers of mere words. Bovary is bored by her general practice Doctor Husband.  In fact his simple ways embarrass her, because she wants more, always more.  Heart-breaking scene about the inability to fit in, and how ones desires can lead them to inadvertent selfishness.