MADAME BOVARY (1991) *** Isabelle Huppert's performance is everything that you could hope for, and more than you realized that there was to fear from such a girl: sympathetic, repulsive, human. All of the acting's great, not just her, just that it's all centered off of her, she reflects it all, it only tries to shed some light on the dimming star. Light that the star has lost. When you diminish the importance of the things that should be important, it's not an easy thing to replace what you've replaced them with, when you have to. So, Jean-Françoise Balmer as the good, weak doctor; I don't know if anyone could ever be more of an empty-hearted French stud than Christophe Malavoy. The whole thing is so beautifully and outrageously (and, in turn, occasionally, nauseatingly) French, the small towns, the small town mentality. Gustave Flaubert's time when giant ideas spread their wings over the small towns with tragic, and glorious, results. Not for the simple minded or sentimental. Especially not for the simple minded sentimental. If there's a tragicomic twist in there, and there are many it's just that they're all washed away in the flooding, Claude Chabrol…saves his strongest shadows of a wink for something else. Don't evoke what he's staring it, he's only playing a game. On this level.
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