Writer Gustave Flaubert may have declared "Madame Bovary, c'est moi."
But Isabelle Huppert is in no such danger of merging with the character she creates: Isabelle Huppert is not Emma Bovary. Make no mistake."Isabelle is an actress," says French director Claude Chabrol, in awe of his formidable leading lady. "If she was Madame Bovary, she would kill and swallow all the men!"
Working together for the third time, Chabrol and Huppert brought an exquisitely wrought version of the 1857 classic French novel, "Madame Bovary," to the screen Chrismas Day.
The film detailed the tragic life and untimely death of an ordinary 19th-century woman who longs to escape the tedium of her life and to be transported into a world of glorious passion and wealth, the kind one only reads about in cheap romances.
"She lives in her dreams and in her imagination," Huppert says of Madame Bovary.
Considered scandalous in its day - Flaubert was prosecuted for immorality for its depiction of the adulterous Emma - the novel is considered to be one of the most important of its century. And while Chabrol was obsessed by this project, he was daunted by the task of bringing it to the screen. It is at least the eighth film version, and the truest yet to the book, as was Chabrol's intent.
"I always felt it was impossible," says the affable director of 44 films. "And even now, I like the film, but I think I'm a little mad."
Flaubert called his heroine a "living flame." But to many she has come to symbolize a weariness of spirit. In France, the word "Bovarysme" (Bovarism) means "the comportment of those who are led by dissatisfaction to ambitious reverie."
But as Huppert read "Madame Bovary" again and again, preparing for her role, she caught the spark. "For many people, Bovary is the idea of passivity and boredness," the French actress says. "That's not the way I considered the character. I thought she was more alive, had more vividness, was more active in her despair. And that's how I started doing the part."
Chabrol labored over the screenplay. Dialogue was lifted from the novel, and renderings of locations kept as close to Flaubert's descriptions as possible. It was shot in Lyons-la-Foret, near the city of Rouen where Flaubert lived. Whenever a question arose during filming, Chabrol would turn again to "the Bible," as he calls Flaubert's book.
("Flaubert, c'est moi?" Chabrol jests. "I am not Flaubert. It's too bad for me.")
In her 45 films, the small, delicate Huppert often has played a rebellious woman, somehow constrained by time and place. "They were always women being trapped in a narrow-minded world, dreaming of something else," Huppert says.
In Chabrol's "Violette" (for which she won best actress at Cannes in 1978) she was a murderous streetwalker-schoolgirl. And in Chabrol's 1988 "Story of Women," she plays an impoverished World War II era housewife who performs illegal abortions. She has played any number of prostitutes and a madam in the ill-fated "Heaven's Gate" (1980).
"All the films are her character against all the rest of the world. More than Rocky!" Chabrol says.
Flaubert's Madame Bovary dwells in a society where marriage was women's only real choice. And for Emma, married to a dull, provincial doctor, wedlock becomes a golden cage.
"She goes from prison to prison," says Huppert, who at 35, looks ageless. "Wherever she finds herself, she always finds herself being trapped. She's trapped as a little girl in father's farmhouse. She's trapped in the marriage. She's trapped in the idea of always having more and more dresses and money. What she longs for she definitely can't find in this world, in the world where she lives."
Bovary was a 19th-century bourgeoise, but there are Bovarys still.
"I think, emotionally, the character is very much eternal and very universal," says Huppert. "I think forever there are women, or even men, who have reasons to be frustrated, or have unfulfilled dreams."
But Emma, if she lived today? "Today, she would find a way of getting out of it. She wouldn't die," Huppert says.
Almost always, throughout her career, Huppert has been at the center of her films. For her, that is the only way.
"It's difficult for me to make movies, otherwise. Maybe because I'm a little bit like an ant, you know. I go very slowly, but I have to build big things. Big, big things. That's my way of being as an actress. I would have difficulty to squeeze myself in a small part in which I'm not really the center. Because I can't really be like an ant if I have a small role, I really have to be like a panther," she says, her English lightly accented.
"I need time. I need time. And because I need time, I need a big role. Because it takes me a long time to build a character."
Chabrol is perfectly aware of Huppert's powers.
"She eats all the other actors. We see them, but she tries to eat them, too," he says, chuckling. "She's a very strong character. And it's why she's at her best when she can swallow all the film and the film must be her. It's the way - for me it's obvious - it's stupid to have somebody like Isabelle and to give her a good `little' part. She's better when she can swallow the others. . . . For me it's very pleasant to help her to do that."
When asked to describe Huppert as an actress, Chabrol pauses and smiles mischievously. "I must be very cautious because she reads all the articles and when I say something she doesn't like. . . . I think she's like Buster Keaton. Her face is a canvas, you can read everything in it. . . . And you can read it like a book. It's unique - I don't know how she does it," he says.
He goes on to describe how his star prepared to play the role of Madame Bovary.
"She'd take it like a piece of something," he says, looking around for an object to help illustrate his point. "To make it very dense, very dense.
"She . . ." he picks up a piece of newspaper and begins wadding it into a ball. "Here's the part. Very compact. Then she swallows," he says, miming the act.
"Before the beginning of the shooting, sometimes she's upset. She asks, she phones. The moment when she swallows the pill, she never asks again."
Success came early to Huppert, the daughter of Hungarian emigres, raised outside Paris. She made her first film at age 16. She has an air about her of confidence and certainty.
"She knows she knows the way to do things," is how Chabrol puts it. But it is a demeanor, she says, consciously constructed. "It's a mixture of something you really believe in and something you don't believe in at all," she says.
Huppert lives in Paris with Italian director Ronald Chammah and their two children. An omnipresence in France, if anything has eluded the actress, it has been American success. And she does not deny its considerable allure.
"There was always America: Because America is a big country and because the cinema is very powerful here, it's always a conquest you want to make. But on the other hand you want to remain yourself. You want to conquer something, but you don't want to lose your identity. That's the most difficult thing," she says.
Yet she is glad there are still dreams to attain.
"I wouldn't want to have everything between my hands," Huppert says. "But, also, it can be tiring always longing for something you don't have. You must compromise between longings and satisfaction."