‘The Story of Adele H.‘ made in 1975 is one of François Truffaut‘s most beautiful films. If I had to choose one film to illustrate the second half of his career, I think I would choose this one. It is a seemingly simple film that tells an obsessive love story that could be told in many ways, that could easily slip into the grotesque or ‘horror’ but which manages to avoid all the pitfalls and remain sincere and emotional. The film is inspired by a real biography, that of the unhappy life and love story of Adele, Victor Hugo’s daughter, and although I am very cautious about films that visibly expose the label ‘authentic story’ I think this time the label fits. I don’t know how faithful the screenplay is to the historical details, to the letters exchanged by Adele with her famous father, or to the personal diary kept by the heroine, but I think that the film, beyond factual authenticity, has another much more important quality – artistic authenticity.
In many languages of the Earth we find expressions like ‘crazy love’ or ‘madness out of love’. Love and madness are close states. Adele’s story is such a case. Victor Hugo’s young and beautiful daughter (Isabelle Adjani), who lived in exile with her parents on one of the Channel Islands, traumatized by the death of her sister, drown at sea, falls in love with a young British officer, Lieutenant Albert Pinson (Bruce Robinson). The young man is handsome but a womaniser style Don Juan by nature and a games addict on top, so Adele’s family refuses their intention to get married. The officer leaves for a new garrison in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Adele travels in his footsteps. To her despair, Albert nowrejects her, he already went on to his next adventures. Adele is not only ready to do anything (including lies, intrigue, harassment) to regain her love, but as her attempts fail one after the other, she refuses to accept reality. Love becomes obsessive and turns into a spiral of madness. The society that had protected her until then (as the relatively rich daughter of a great personality of the time) becomes hostile to her and will eventually crush her, but when that happens, psychologically, she was already lost.
Isabelle Adjani was 19 when she filmed ‘Adele H.‘ François Truffaut models her as he knew how to do with many of the formidable actresses he has cast in his films, and Adjani dominates the film with her fascinating beauty, embodying the passion that becomes obsessive over time. At a certain point the story could have slid into horror, but this doesn’t happen. The love that turns into madness destroys, but the main victim is the heroine herself, who eventually ends up not recognising her former lover. Passion, turned abstract, had devoured his very image. The cinematography, which belongs to Néstor Almendros, also focuses on the image of the heroine, emphasising the contrasts between naive beauty and inner storms, between the white of the skin, the elegance of the silhouette and the cold, wet and dark roughness of the interiors and nature around her. ‘The Story of Adele H.‘ is the film that brings François Truffaut the closest to the status of master of the art of cinema.