Cinema
Madame Bovary (PG', selected cinemas) Cop and a Half (PG', selected cinemas)
Wrung-out dishcloth
Vanessa Letts
In Claude Chabrol's dishcloth version of Madame Bovary the inadequacy of screen adaptations from novels is demonstrated to us as never before. The film hits rock bot- tom for the genre Merchant-Ivoire, and should be shunned by all. Madame Bovary is played by a haggard 36-year-old with stringy, mouse-coloured hair (Isabelle Huppert); Rodolphe is a clot with dancing eyebrows (Christophe Malavoy). Even though it's only temporary, the sight of these two has a polluting effect on one's memory of the book.
Chabrol's many perversions are summed up in the depiction of one object — Madame Bovary's wedding-cake. In the novel this improbable and delightful cre- ation is described with documentary preci- sion. The base is a temple with colonnades, porticoes, statuettes and gold-paper stars; the second layer a castle with fortifications; the platform on top is a field with rocks and pools, boats made of nutshells and a Cupid perched on a swing made of choco- late. In the film it is a huge blob of snot covered with thick, green trails of food colouring.
Other attempts to 'bring the book to life' are equally feeble. Vivid details which form the backbone of the novel are distorted, left out or wrong. The overall impression this gives is that the makers are tightwads. A basket of apricots concealing Rod- olphe's letter is filled instead with oranges; a scene at the opera opens conveniently just as the curtain is falling. Flaubert's descriptions of Madame Bovary's outfits in the book are very exact; the costumes seen on screen, however, reveal a 19th-century Dorothy Perkins.
According to Claude Chabrol, the film is 'absolutely faithful'. The dialogue 'almost to the comma' is from the book. However, if Chabrol thinks the odd snippet from the original text is going to save him, he is a fool. Anyone who has read the novel before will remember feeling the pangs when Emma runs across the morning fields, pulling herself along shrivelled wallflowers on the riverbank, for assigna- tions with Rodolphe. Incredible as it may seem, in Chabrol's version these come across as dull. Partly this is the fault of the screenplay. As usual it is too compressed to give a sense of the years dragging by. When Emma and Leon jump into a cab with the blinds drawn down for eight hours, the film makes it look more like an in-out hop around.
Isabelle Huppert looks the same deathly age all through. Her performance is the worst aspect of this film. She is calculating Where she ought to be guileless and asexual Where she ought to be raunchy. It's a mark of how extremely bad she is that the thought of Emma Thompson as Madame Bovary (chilling, yes) is preferable to Hup- pert. Don't waste your money on this film. Instead of traipsing up on the Tube to the West End and back, you could be reading the novel at home in the comfort of your own armchair.
Cop and a Half, the buddy-buddy com- edy caper for children, is 50 times more bearable. It belongs to a species of film Which parents rightly dread. In this case Your little ones will be encouraged to look Up to the police force. Their ways are embodied in the vast and violent figure of Burt Reynolds. The proportion of his arms, Chest and belly to his lower regions is cause for wonderment in itself, the top half bil- lowing out of tight jeans as though it is going to explode, at any moment.
Meanwhile the music is quite jolly, and the jokes and chases are just as exciting as the equivalent in action films for adults. For the older generation, however, Cop and a Half's chief redeeming feature is like- ly to be Burt Reynolds's enduring hatred for his eight-year-old co-star, Norman D. Golden II, an exasperating individual from North Carolina. It is to his credit that it is only in the very last scene of the film that Reynolds wordlessly capitulates to the child's potent charms.
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