I Am Not Madame Bovary movie review (2017) | Little White Lies

I Am Not Madame Bovary

26 May 2017 / Released: 26 May 2017

Words by Claire Langlais

Directed by Xiaogang Feng

Starring Bingbing Fan, Chengpeng Dong, and Wei Fan

Young woman with long dark hair in profile, looking contemplative, framed by a circular window with a blurred green and blue outdoor scene in the background.
Young woman with long dark hair in profile, looking contemplative, framed by a circular window with a blurred green and blue outdoor scene in the background.
4

Anticipation.

We’re always up for seeing Fan Bingbing taking revenge on men.

3

Enjoyment.

Sometimes it’s a little slow but the ending is worth the build-up.

4

In Retrospect.

A comedy that rightly demonstrates the sad truth of China’s bureaucracy and prejudice.

China’s bureau­cra­cy is exposed to great comedic effect in this sharp satire from direc­tor Feng Xiaogang.

There exists a fic­tion­al Chi­nese char­ac­ter known as Pan Jin­lian’, who was a woman who com­mit­ted adul­tery and mat­ri­cide, and was lat­er killed by her dead husband’s broth­er. Flaubert’s nov­el Madame Bovary’ and the con­cept of Pan Jin­lian are strong­ly linked as they both refer to char­ac­ters who cheat­ed on their hus­bands to escape the monot­o­ny of their lives. Plus, they both died a trag­ic death.

This sets the scene for Feng Xiaogang’s I Am Not Madame Bovary, which tells the sto­ry of Li Xuelian (Fan Bing­bing), a woman from a small town in Chi­na who sues her ex-hus­band on the grounds that their divorce was fake. What should be an open and shut case rapid­ly evolves into a fight against the law­mak­ers of her coun­ty and, even­tu­al­ly, Beijing’s high­est offi­cials. Li (also referred to as Lian) takes var­i­ous steps to get her case heard when she is referred to as a Pan Jin­lian by her ex-hus­band, which is real­ly a lit­er­ary syn­onym for slut.

And as word spreads fast, she becomes deter­mined to pre­serve her rep­u­ta­tion. The film is for­mal­ly very inter­est­ing as it uses var­i­ous aspect ratios and changes from cir­cu­lar frame (a link to many aspects of Chi­nese cul­ture such as tra­di­tion­al paint­ings, win­dows and fem­i­nine fans), to (almost) square and Cin­e­mas­cope. Xiaogang’s choice of most­ly using a cir­cu­lar aspect ratio is a bold way to show how a woman’s arti­fi­cial­ly nar­rowed envi­ron­ment impacts the steps she takes.

The film is pow­ered by hints of humour and inevitable sor­row, while there are a few over­long pas­sages and one par­tic­u­lar­ly annoy­ing scene that has been ripped direct­ly from Liu Zhenyun’s source nov­el. Yet Fan and her male co-stars man­age to main­tain the sense of dra­ma right until the end. The film leaves us to won­der whether Li will final­ly be under­stood by those in charge of her own country’s crooked legal system.

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