Recapturing Madame Bovary {Paris Photo}

Madame Bovary Recaptured I © 2015 Chant Wagner

As a new filmic version of Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary is about to be released, you can spy certain parallelisms and juxtapositions in the streets of Paris, which seem to ascertain the contemporaneity of the story...

And then, just across the street, there is yet another movie called Mon Roi, which sounds like it carries the same masochistic flavor as in that archetypal "destiny" of a woman who loses herself to her illusions and especially as embodied by the pursuit of ideal love relationships which prove to be exactly the reverse of that ideal.

Madame Bovary Recaptured II © 2015 Chant Wagner

It's best, like for photography, to pause momentarily on those moods and stories, and then hear the din of life and the bustle of the city cut through those. Isn't it unfortunate that since the story of Tristan and Yseult, the same myth of love gets reenacted in Europe, in which love has to be blind, adulterous, transgressive of marriage, and more attached to death than to the cultivation of knowledge of a particular, real person?

So, here are two pictures which acknowledge the myth, but also turn them into moods, like the color of a veil, or the changing light on a street.

There are no destinies. There are only stories, with several viewpoints.

Let's dream, but let's dream well.

What perfume to go with these photos? L'Heure Bleue by Guerlain, of course.