Variations and cinematographic recreations of Madame Bovary

Abstract

Since the creation of the cinematograph, literature has been a source of inspiration for films and scripts. Consequently, literature from the canon were and continue to be desirable for numerous adaptations and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, the seminal realist novel, couldn’t have escaped this phenomenon. There are around twenty adaptations and different versions of the novel by French film directors such as Jean Renoir (1933) and Claude Chabrol (1991), American directors such as Vicente Minelli (1949).

In this article, I am going to focus on two inter-artistic and intersemiotic variations from indirect adaptations of Flaubert. One, Portuguese, Vale Abraão (1993), by Manoel de Oliveira, based on the novel with the same name by Agustina Bessa-Luís, where Bovary is from the Douro region, and the other French, Gemma Bovery (2014), by Anne Fontaine, a recreation of the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds where a reader of a French novel attempts to read the real through fiction.