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Synopsis
In Madame Bovary, Chabrol directs one of his greatest collaborators, actress Isabelle Huppert, in perhaps the definitive depiction of Flaubert’s classic heroine.
Picture 9/10
Claude Chabrol’s adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary receives a new Blu-ray edition from Arrow Video, presenting it on a dual-layer disc in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1. The 1080p/24hz high-definition presentation is sourced from a new 4K restoration performed by MK2. As of this writing it is available exclusively as third disc in Arrow’s box set Lies & Deceit: Five Films by Claude Chabrol.
As the lone period piece in the set, it ends up being the most extravagant looking one due to the period settings and costumes, and Arrow’s presentation does mostly well by it. The restoration work has cleaned things up neatly, no severe marks ever popping up at any point throughout the film, and the image is very stable, no shifting or pulsing present. The digital encode is pretty much perfect and the fine grain structure is rendered cleanly and naturally. This then leads to an impeccable level of detail, every little facet of the period costumes and sets popping off screen. Long shots of landscapes also manage to show high levels of detail, from blades of grass to bark on the trees.
The colours lean a warmer yellow, as with most of the presentations in Arrow’s box set, but this could be intentional. An archival supplement on this disc, created for an older DVD, makes use of standard-definition presentation when presenting scenes from the film. Though that image looks cooler in comparison to what is here, with the whites taking on a blue tinge, you can still make out the hotter hues in skin tones and some of the settings. For example, the third screen grab included here, showing Emma and Charles in a garden, looks very similar to the same sequence found in that standard-definition presentation. The new colour grading also presents whites that look whiter in comparison to the older presentation, just warmer in the end, and some of the interiors are supposed to appear to be lit by candlelight, so having a warmer, more orange-like look for these scenes makes sense. Still, blues end up being rare, cyan coming off more dominant.
When it comes to colours it’s a bit of a toss-up and maybe they should be somewhere in between the two presentations, yet I still found the end results here very pleasing, and the colours ended up not being too big of an issue for me. The level of detail is stunning, the grain is rendered beautifully, and the restoration has really cleaned things up. I thought this came out looking good.
Madame Bovary - Screen Captures
Audio 7/10
Arrow includes a lossless PCM 1.0 monaural presentation. It’s a dynamic soundtrack despite the film being generally quiet on the whole. Dialogue and the voice-over narration come out sounding crisp and clean with adequate fidelity, and the music that does pop up offers a decent amount of range.
Extras 7/10
I was always under the impression this was one of Chabrol’s more popular “recent” films so I was a bit surprised that this disc doesn’t end up being one of the more stacked ones in the set, though I could be completely off the mark in that regard.
As with the other films in the set Arrow includes a newly recorded audio commentary, this time featuring film critic and author Kat Ellinger. Ellinger’s track marks a significant improvement over the ones recorded by Ben Sachs for the two previous titles in the set, Cop au Vin and Inspector Lavardin. Despite appearing to be knowledgeable about Chabrol and enjoying his work, his tracks felt to lack preparation, leading to a lot of fluff and dead space. Ellinger ends up being the opposite, coming to this one clearly prepared with a lot of material to cover about Chabrol’s adaptation and why he was so inclined to tackle it, with the added bonus that she appears to have actually read the novel. She touches on the film/story and the themes that can be taken away from it, whether it be how the film portrays different types of love (romantic, maternal, and spiritual) or how it tackles the oppressive nature and double standards of the time (and now), before pointing out how the films does share similarities to some of Chabrol's other work. The performers and the performances also get special mention, with more of a focus on Huppert, and there are of course comparisons between the film and the source text, with notes on what has been adjusted.
Surprisingly Ellinger doesn’t get into other adaptations, at least in-depth, but that void ends up being filled by a new 16-minute video essay by Pamela Hutchinson, the film historian working through the various interpretations of the source novel along with the films or other works that took the same concept and played with them in a meta fashion. Arrow also includes a 3-minute archival introduction by film scholar Joël Magny, who goes over the background of the film a bit before quickly talking about the film itself.
As with the other titles, Arrow also carries over a select-scene commentary featuring Chabrol himself talking over 37-minutes’ worth of sequences that include the ball scene and then a few scenes between Emma Bovary (Isabelle Huppert) and Rodolphe Boulanger (Christophe Malavoy). The idea behind the film, mentioned by Chabrol here and by others through the other supplements, was that it was supposed to be what Flaubert himself would have made if he had been a filmmaker instead of a writer, and the director explains how the text played into a lot of his decisions when it came to the performances or some of the technical aspects, and he seems very pleased with some of his own touches. As with the other Chabrol commentaries found in the set, it’s very engaging and well worth listening to.
The disc then closes with a short trailer that plays the film up as a fairly standard period piece, followed by a gallery featuring a small selection of production photos and two posters.
Again, I was expecting more (like interviews, archival or new, with the cast) but the new features that Arrow have created are some of the better ones in the set.
Closing
Not the stacked edition that I would have expected but the presentation, colours aside, looks outstanding.
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