Writers at the Movies: Twenty-Six Contemporary Authors Celebrate Twenty-Six Memorable Movies
288
Writers at the Movies: Twenty-Six Contemporary Authors Celebrate Twenty-Six Memorable Movies
288Paperback(First Edition)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780060954918 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 11/14/2000 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.12(h) x 0.72(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Book Into Film: Chabrol's
Madame Bovary
Claude Chabrol lives in Gennes, a small town on the southern bank of the Loire, upstream from Angers. The river here is sluggish and shallow enough for high-summer fishermen merely to punt their boats. A basic box-girder bridge crosses the flow in two leaps, setting its foot down on a humpy island of sand. This bridge (or, more likely, its predecessor) was the site of a famous rearguard action by cadets of the nearby Saumur Military Academy against the advancing Germans in 1940. On the other side of the Loire lies La Rosette, whose traditional small-town rivalry with Gennes can take strange forms. A few days before I met Chabrol, a woman from La Rosette decided to drown herself by lumping off the bridge. An emergency call came through to the sapeurs-pompiers of La Rosette. "None of our business," they replied. "There isn't enough water on our side for her to drown herself." So the caller was obliged to put the phone down and redial the fire brigade of Gennes, who arrived too late to save the unfortunate woman.
Provincial France, now trundled through by British caravans rather than German tanks, has always specialized in tragedies of the comic grotesque, their private misery magnified by casual, uncaring public circumstances. Like the case of Delphine Couturier, the bored and fanciful wife of a health officer in the Norman village of Ry in the 1840s. She was remembered as a pretty woman with a taste for reading and interior decoration (her double curtains of yellow and black were much remarked on), who took first lovers and then poison, the latterin 1848. This obscure fait divers from the Vexin region became, in less than a decade, the magnificent and cruel machine of Madame Bovary. Not that Flaubert's imaginative transformation of the story impressed Delphine Couturier's servant, Augustine, who survived her mistress by more than half a century. Interviewed as amazingly late as 1905, when she was seventy-nine, Augustine was invited to compare her mistress's death in 1848 with the fictionalized version. Her reply is one of Life's great rebukes to Art: "Ah!" she said, "It was all much sadder than in the book."
Given Chabrol's expertise with violent provincial drama, it's surprising that he wasn't asked to film Madame Bovary before 1991. The novel itself had fascinated him from an early age-earlier, in fact, than he initially remembered. When the film project was announced, he routinely commented that he must have first encountered Flaubert at the age of fifteen or sixteen. But after shooting began, the flagrantly French truth came back to him. He bad been thirteen at the time, growing up in the Creuse:
It made a very strong impression. I was fascinated. I didn't understand everything, but I was under its spell. And then the next day, I had a rendezvous with the girl I was in love with. We went for a walk in the woods. We were wearing sabots. We had our walk, we kissed a lot, and then what had to happen happened.... By the time I walked her home it was getting dark. We were holding hands, I was kissing her, but at the same time I was in a hurry to get home and carry on with my book. So I walked her back a little more quickly than was necessary, and as soon as I was alone I ran home as fast as I could. I had to go back through the wood, it was dark, and as I ran I lost one of my sabots. It was too dark to find it, and I had to hop my way home, with only one thing on my mind: getting back to my book.
This (distinctly filmic) reminiscence suggests a new dinner-table question. Instead of "Do you remember where you were when Kennedy was shot?" we should ask, "Do you remember what you were reading when you lost your virginity?"
Chabrol freely admits that his output, while prolific and often swifthe made a German TV version of Goethe's Elective Affinities in twenty-six days-had been variable in quality. "I think on the whole I prefer the films that I like and that did badly to the films I made that I dislike and that did well." "Are there any," I asked, "that you don't like and that 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 [Marcell 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 studded with antiquaires and guard-dog notices. There is a certain misconceived rivalry between and the village of Ry as to which was the "real" Yonville of Flaubert's novel. Chabrol favored Lyons, partly on grounds of topographical plausibility (which is contestable) and partly because of the shared yon of each name (though an equal case could be made 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 is misconceived for two reasons: First, because given that the village is portrayed as 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 cinegeneity has landed both Renoir and Chabrol.