'La souriante Madame Beudet' narrates, with great economy and visual inventiveness, two days in the life of an early-XXth century Madame Bovary. The acting here can be related to expressionism, notably for Monsieur Beudet who recalls the freaky Doctor Caligari in more ways than one.
The sharpness of the narration, deserved by the minimal plot, allows the director to focus on the important issues - namely routine, small-town bourgeois life and dreams.
The use of objects is here both highly symbolic and narrative, as the way characters interact with them tend to define the characters and emphasize on their differences - eg.: the flower pot's position on the marble table embodies on its own the wish for either order and its counterpart the routine, or the will to escape and disrupt the way things are.
Irony is here too - and used with appropriateness to serve the plot in a somewhat cruel way. The title itself, you would have understood, is fairly ironic.
All in all, 'La souriante Madame Beudet' is an impressive, highly enjoyable poem in motion - the opening scene displaying sun shades on the sea and then the Claude Debussy score is pure magic, both cinematic impressionism and visual example of what V. Woolf called 'stream of consciousness'.
7/10
The sharpness of the narration, deserved by the minimal plot, allows the director to focus on the important issues - namely routine, small-town bourgeois life and dreams.
The use of objects is here both highly symbolic and narrative, as the way characters interact with them tend to define the characters and emphasize on their differences - eg.: the flower pot's position on the marble table embodies on its own the wish for either order and its counterpart the routine, or the will to escape and disrupt the way things are.
Irony is here too - and used with appropriateness to serve the plot in a somewhat cruel way. The title itself, you would have understood, is fairly ironic.
All in all, 'La souriante Madame Beudet' is an impressive, highly enjoyable poem in motion - the opening scene displaying sun shades on the sea and then the Claude Debussy score is pure magic, both cinematic impressionism and visual example of what V. Woolf called 'stream of consciousness'.
7/10