Swiftly following the BBC's saga of a country doctor's daughter, Wives and Daughters (1999), comes their tale of a country doctor's wife. Madame Bovary is adapted from the great French novel by Gustave Flaubert and recounts the story of a young woman who longs for a more passionate life than her provincial world can ever accommodate. Unwilling to accept the confines of her marriage to the steady and conventional Charles (Hugh Bonneville), Emma Bovary (Frances O'Connor) embarks on self-deluding affairs that lead to tragedy. As selfishly amoral as Emma Bovary is, and even though her motivation is sometimes unfathomable in this version, we do feel for her plight and the story develops with cumulative power--though a ridiculous sex scene against a tree doesn't help. This is at least the 10th screen adaptation, the 1949 Hollywood take and the 1991 French version by Claude Chabrol being the most notable. The story is a predecessor of Jules et Jim (1962) and Betty Blue (1986) and inspired David Lean's great film Ryan's Daughter (1970). This version has a dark visual beauty and a powerful central performance by Frances O'Connor, but a brisker pace and sharper psychological insight might have transformed a polished entertainment into a television classic. --Gary S. Dalkin, Amazon.co.uk
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