‘Madame Bovary’ (NR)

During his labor on "Madame Bovary," Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend, "Everything should be done coldly, with poise." And in directing his film adaption of the novel, Claude Chabrol has followed the master's instructions to the letter. The veteran French filmmaker's treatment is precise, deliberate and a peerless example of faithful allegiance to its source.

But Chabrol has taken his countryman's advice far too literally. The movie is coldly done, all right, yet as an exercise in literary transposition it's as joyless as ditch digging. He's managed to reproduce Flaubert's clinical fastidiousness, the diligent spadework done in the service of realism, but none of the tensile passion that gave his prose its shapely muscle.

All this may sound like ragging on the movie for not measuring up to the novel, a long-winded way of saying "I liked the book better." A successful rendition of Emma Bovary's story -- of her petit-bourgeois ambitions, her loveless marriage and her extramarital fiascoes -- could be presented without following literally in its creator's footsteps, one, for example, that used its source only as a springboard for the adapting artist's leap in the same fictional themes. But Chabrol, who has Isabelle Huppert as his adulterous Emma, seems to have worked here without the inspiration of a strong personal vision, or the empathetic ability to enter into its creator's skin.

Nor can he get inside the soul of his heroine. Flaubert's genius was that he could see Emma both from within and from without; we felt her emotions, her claustrophobia and her frustrations with her dullard husband (played here by Jean-Francois Balmer), yet at the same time saw through the cruel amorality of her rationalizations. Chabrol, on the other hand, is careful about his facts -- he's studiously objective -- but he can't invest them with any psychological weight.

A great actress might have rescued him; unfortunately, he has Huppert, who plays Emma as a shallow, pouty brat. And while Flaubert's heroine might have been both, there was a tragic magnitude in her banality that evoked sympathy and identification. Huppert makes us want to shove this creep down a flight of stairs. Her Emma Bovary merely expresses, in microcosm, what is wrong with the movie as a whole. What she and her director have given us is a colorless facsimile that is the opposite of ideal -- that instead of leading us to a great work, turns us away.