In Thomas's eyes, it is Emma's very neuroses that make her so appealing. She has nothing to channel her neuroses into apart from love affairs." Life is only worth living for her on a very intense level. The mundanity of her life drives her mad. "It's a book about sex and shopping - everyone can relate to those preoccupations. She coulda been a contender."įywell, too, sees contemporary parallels in Madame Bovary. I live in Saffron Waldron, and I know too many Emmas there. She'd be addicted to Prozac and sit all day drinking coffee and complaining about her lot. She would be unhappily married, living somewhere like Tring and driving a Jeep which she'd park at Waitrose diagonally across two spaces. If she were around today, Emma would have dropped out of university and done something flimsy like PR. According to Thomas: "It's a novel about the corrosiveness of human unhappiness, and that's still an extraordinarily immediate theme. Madame Bovary's specific plight provides us with a universal insight into the nature of dissatisfaction. (To underline the book's continuing relevance, Posy Simmonds recently produced Gemma Bovary, a bestselling comic-strip update of the book.) Like Flaubert, we can all find echoes of Emma in ourselves. Leaving aside the niceties of converting the filigree of a novel into the broad brush-strokes of a film, this production of Madame Bovary will certainly resonate with viewers. The way Emma surrenders to men is part of her drama.'' Sex is often the key to what's going on in a person's soul. You can't deal with this story now without going beyond Flaubert's three dots. You couldn't do Madame Bovary for this generation without addressing sex in at least moderate detail. "By depicting sex, we're showing the immediacy of the piece and emphasising the sheer nerve of the girl. You can't just have a shot of a bee on a flower." "She is a sensual and sexual woman, and you have to show that. But Tim Fywell is quick to defend the scenes in which Emma and Rodolphe get, er, back to nature in the woods.
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