Director Chabrol Succumbs to Lure of ‘Madame Bovary’ : Movies: For nearly 30 years, the Frenchman toyed with the idea of adapting Flaubert’s novel--until Isabelle Huppert came along.

French director Claude Chabrol agrees that there’s a certain inevitability in his bringing Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel “Madame Bovary” to the screen. For more than 30 years, Chabrol has skewered the smugness and hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, both in his stylish, darkly humorous suspense thrillers and also in his more sober films. Emma Bovary, the ill-fated wife of an ungainly French provincial physician in the mid-19th Century, is a kind of ultimate victim of bourgeois values, the kind of rebel against convention with whom Chabrol has always empathized.

“I love this woman. She’s wonderful,” Chabrol said during a recent luncheon interview in a West Hollywood hotel. “The way she shows how she thinks, the way she talks. This bourgeois society Flaubert hates as much as I do, and for the same reasons.”

Asked if it was true that he had long wanted to film “Madame Bovary,” he smiled mischievously. “Ah, it’s more perverse than that! For a long time I swore I would not do it! I never try to adapt masterpieces. It’s such a silly, absurd thing to do. Yet in 1963 or ‘64, I began to think that perhaps it would be possible to try it, only to decide against it. I thought about doing it every six or seven years. Suddenly, I saw that it could be done when I saw Isabelle Huppert in Turgenev’s ‘A Summer in the Country.’ I thought Isabelle in that play is exactly like Emma Bovary.”

“Madame Bovary” was to become the third collaboration between one of the French cinema’s finest actresses and Chabrol. It began in 1978 when Huppert starred in the title role of Chabrol’s “Violette,” playing a highly complex and contradictory 18-year-old who created a great scandal in the 1930s when she murdered her parents. More recently, in Chabrol’s “Story of Women,” Huppert played another character based on an actual person, a frustrated, impoverished housewife in a drab port town who faces dire consequences when she turns abortionist during the Occupation. (For that matter, Flaubert based his novel on a true story, the model for Emma having borne the romantic name of Delphine Delamare.)

“When Isabelle agreed that perhaps we could do ‘Madame Bovary,’ I felt a tempest in my head!,” exclaimed Chabrol, who at 61 remains as enthusiastic about filmmaking as he did nearly 35 years ago when he launched the New Wave with “Le Beau Serge.”

“It went against all my rules in not filming the classics. But I thought that if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it. I thought, Isabelle is the perfect actress, and that it’s just at the right moment for me: I’m not too young or too old. Then I asked my producer, Marin Karmitz, if I should do it, and he said, ‘Yes, of course.’

“The writing of the screenplay was very difficult--when it was done, the rest was simple. Isabelle is easy to work with: She has no caprice. I read the book three or four times, and then I closed it. I tried to remember all the scenes and tried to write them exactly as described in the book. The book was too long, so I cut the first 50 pages, and also the last 50, except for the last page. Those first 50 pages are Charles Bovary’s story, before he meets and marries Emma. This was Flaubert’s attempt to make Charles three-dimensional, but I decided that if the actor who is playing Charles (Jean-Francois Balmer) is good, he can be those 50 pages.

“As for the final 50 pages, I decided I could not interest the audience after this character, Emma, dies--that this is impossible. So I cut to the last page, which tells what happens to Emma’s husband and child. Of course, I lost two or three great scenes--as when Charles finds the letters of Emma’s lover Rodolphe to her or when he dies with Rodolphe’s letters in his hand.”

Before writing his “Madame Bovary” screenplay, Chabrol, a native Parisian, and his wife left Paris for the country. “We moved to the coast between Paris and Brittany, just before the Loire castles begin. We kept a pied-a-terre in Paris, but it would be the first time I wrote there. I felt a little bit like Flaubert in his house in Normandy. I was so happy when I finished writing, but then I changed many, many things for another month. I put Flaubert’s portrait on my desk in front of me. Sometimes, I swear, I thought he was making faces at me! I tried to make him happy--you cannot improve upon a masterpiece--and I am sure he wrote the script with me.”

Preproduction involved painstaking research. An admirer of Flaubert since his student days at the Sorbonne, Chabrol secured authentic locales and found appropriate period fabrics for clothes.

Chabrol has weathered various career highs and lows, but has been on a steady upsurge since teaming with Karmitz in 1984. Chabrol met his ideal producer nearly two years earlier, “when Karmitz was a radical Maoist--against his parents. Then he bought some theaters, then he became a distributor and finally a producer as well. He knows I’m very serious when I work--I look like a troll. When I say I will shoot a film in 43 days, I will shoot it in 43 days.

“The film opened in Paris very well last April, with good reviews except for two or three, which were very violent. They asked, ‘Why is it so faithful to the book?’ ” By way of answer, Chabrol explains that he did not want to impose himself upon the film and preferred “to tilt more toward Flaubert.”

“Flaubert seemed much more sardonic in his own time than he does now,” Chabrol said. “I tried to transpose his degree of irony. Such things are impossible to be sure about, but I tried above all to be faithful to Flaubert.”

There have been at least nine film versions of “Madame Bovary,” and Chabrol knows well the two most famous versions: Vincente Minnelli’s 1949 film and the 1934 Jean Renoir film.

“The Minnelli film was good, but it was not Flaubert,” he said. “I don’t know if it is Minnelli, but it is certainly MGM. In the ball scene, when Emma waltzes with Rodolphe, the ballroom is in a little nobleman’s little country estate. In the MGM film, it might have been Versailles. When Emma feels faint, there is one valet to smash one window; in the MGM version, there are 10 valets to smash 10 windows. As for the Renoir, the publisher Gallimard was not a real producer and was in love with Valentine Tessier, who was already too old to play Emma, but Renoir agreed. His film was 2 1/2 hours, and Gallimard was greedy. He had it cut by an hour so it could be shown more times in the theater. I understand that now the Renoir estate is trying to restore the film to its original length.”

Chabrol is a short and stocky bon vivant who has fathered three children in the course of three marriages. All of them work with him in varying capacities, as does his second ex-wife, actress Stephane Audran, from time to time, and his current wife, Aurore, who is his script supervisor. He enjoys reminiscing about such favorite directors as Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, both of whom have influenced him greatly. He said that recently he even made a film in English but unknown in the United States called “Dr. M.” as a sort of revival of Lang’s famous diabolical madman, Dr. Mabuse, who is played by Alan Bates.

Since completing “Madame Bovary,” Chabrol has returned to more familiar material, having just finished shooting “Betty,” from a 1962 Georges Simenon novel he said was “absolutely unknown.”

“It’s like ‘Bovary II: The Revenge,’ ” he said, perhaps not entirely kidding. “It’s a thriller without a murder.”