Madame Bovary: A tale of romantic obsession

Flaubert's Emma Bovary must be one of the most frustrating characters in literary fiction. She's right up there with Death of a Salesman's Willy Loman - rushing to her doom while you sit, muttering, no, no. Don't do it.

The novelist and critic, A.S. Byatt, gets it right when she likens our sympathy for Emma to the kind we feel for a bird the cat has brought in and maimed. "It flutters and it will die."

But Byatt is also a fan of the book, describing the vividness and vitality with which Flaubert creates Emma's constricted bourgeois world as a form of contemplation. His canvas may be small but it's painted with such precision that you're set down right in the midst of it. And the boredom you find there, Byatt goes on, is anything but boring. It's terrifying.

Sophie Barthes' film, starring Australia's Mia Wasikowska as Emma, crams her downfall into the first year of her marriage to kind, dull Charles Bovary (Henry Lloyd-Hughes). Consequently, its impact is more dizzying than ever.

We're briefly introduced to her as an innocent optimist while she's still at her convent school. Then comes the modest wedding ceremony at her father's farm before her sudden realisation that she's been pitched into a life of stifling tedium and loneliness. Charles is out visiting patients until late in the evening and she has little to do but concentrate on the pleasures of home improvement. And at this point, the egregious Monsieur Lheureux (Rhys Ifans) shows up, offering generous credit if she would care to patronise the boutique he runs in the village.

This is her first temptation. A more exciting one soon follows. She meets Leon (Ezra Miller), a young notary's clerk, who proves a much more stimulating companion than Charles until she frightens him away with the force of her passion.

Wasikowska gets the bird-like fluttering down in all its desperation. She also catches the self-destructive greed. There are one or two flashes of conscience and concern, too. The strongest flares during the book's most gruesome episode after Charles is talked into performing an operation to repair a poor young villager's clubfoot and botches it. But she doesn't succeed in banishing the spectre of Emma's stupidity. In fact, it's emphasised by the film's concentrated timeframe. The script also conflates a couple of characters, elevating the second of her lovers to the nobility, a device which works well enough as a streamlining stratagem. But the speed of the action now has her scurrying all over the village. Silk skirts rustling, she can barely keep up the pace. And as she runs, romantic obsession morphs into absurdity.

Admittedly, Flaubert wasn't out to evoke sympathy. He was attempting a delicate balancing act aimed at avoiding any hint of sentimentality while recording every sensation that Emma experiences. And he succeeded so well that he was prosecuted for producing a work which offended "public morality, religion and decency". The resulting court case, which went his way, further increased the book's sales, leaving him justifiably overjoyed at having outraged the government, the priests and newspapers. "My triumph," he wrote, "is complete."

Some of the fuss was provoked by his clear-eyed dissection of the French bourgeoisie, its preoccupations and prejudices and  the excesses of today's consumer society make these observations more pertinent than ever. The film makes witty work of them, too, thanks to Paul Giamatti's sly turn as Charles's pompous friend, the pharmacist, and Ifans' Monsieur Lheureux, whose shaggy dog looks are completely at odds with his skill at spinning spiders' webs.

Visually, the film is magnificent. Its set-piece – a stag hunt which doesn't appear in the book – is beautifully realised while eloquently commenting on the brutality of the hunt and the hunters. And Barthes is ever alert to the contrast between the cramped lives of the village and the glories of the surrounding countryside. But she glosses over Flaubert's ending, making something maudlin rather than tragic out of it, and she never comes near to capturing the steeliness which lies at the story's heart. In other words, I haven't changed my mind about Emma. As the film sees them, her flutterings become more frustrating than ever.