Good story, Not enough for a whole film

A different way of telling a story

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Aware of upcoming challenges on ICM to watch as many French films and 70's flicks in a month, I took a look at the 70's credits of auteur François Truffaut. Getting Small Change from a local shop, I searched on Amazon for a tantalising second title,and got set to meet Adele H.View on the film:Taking 7 years to reach the screen after plans for it to be a grand-scale epic starring either Jeanne Moreau or Catherine Deneuve, the limitations placed on co-writer/(with regular collaborators Suzanne Schiffman and Jean Gruault) directing auteur François Truffaut to go small-scale actually benefit the title,as Truffaut reunites with cinematographer Jacqueline Guyot and weaves the camera along the crumbling 1860's streets of Halifax, Nova Scotia,where Adele's red dress stands out like a shimmering light. Working on their second historical/Costume Drama after the magnificent The Wild Child, Truffaut and Guyot expand on the classical elegance of Child with New Wave stylisation seamlessly blended in of an eye-catching crane shot across a see-through building, and icy waves of overlapping images bringing to shore the drowned memories of Adele.Telling the story from Adele's own diary,the writers cleverly adapt her words with the themes across all of Truffaut's work,with the young Adele being detached from her parents in Nova Scotia,and desperately grasping for a love that will never make her fulfilled. Taking on a roll that titans Moreau and Deneuve had their eyes on for years, 20 year old Isabelle Adjani gives an extremely charismatic performance as Adele,whose experience with schizophrenia is treated with great sensitivity by Adjani,that is matched by Adjani's wide-eyed passionate young love,for the story of Adele. H.

The real story of Adèle Hugo, Victor Hugo's youngest daughter, played by a yet-to-be 20-year-old Isabelle Adjani, whose one-sided infatuation to a British officer, Lieutenant Albert Pinson (Robinson), drives her to leave her family and come to Halifax alone, where he is stationed, only to be subjected to more stern rejection from Pinson, eventually she loses her sanity in Barbados and is sent back to her father, she lives until 1915 at the age of 85.Truffaut strong-willedly mines into the absurdity and irrationality of unrequited love evinced from Adèle's own diaries, and beats about the bush about Adèle's mental faculties at then, as at first viewers may get a vague idea that she is a congenital liar and her obsession could be completely derived from her imagination. But soon Pinson's visit clears the suspicion, he actually did be romantically linked with her, but presently he doesn't want anything to do with her, but he never gives an explanation, another sly bullet-dodging of revealing the speculative truth, since, understandably, you can not find that in one's own diaries. So, Adèle's torment, is simultaneously inflicted by Pinson's heartless rebuff and by her own deep-rooted delusion, it always takes two to tango, that's where lies the frustrating perverseness of the little destructive thing called love.The film is Adjani's star-making vehicle, she harrowingly lays bare Adèle's severely troubled soul on top of her ethereal beauty, and marvelously characterizes her vulnerability and paranoia, which are much beyond her age and experiences, and she laudably earns an Oscar nomination for her prowess. Credits should also be given to Bruce Robinson's portrayal of the obnoxiously uppity, narcissistic and self-serving Albert Pinson, who can mercilessly spurn Adjani's Adèle, a nonpareil belle who only wants to be loved by him, it is a rather surreal and idealistic role, and Robinson indeed makes a dent of his own effort notwithstanding that the movie has never focused on him, it is purely a showcase for the young Adjani.Adèle's tragedy is a rich kid's blues, living under the shadow of her world-known father and sibling rivalry, she pestered by the incubus of her late sister Léopoldine's drowning accident, and quintessentially, her relentless pursuit of love and marriage is a desperate attempt to imitate Léopoldine's short but fulfilled life, in Adèle's recount, the husband of Léopoldine voluntarily dies with her, that is something she needs to possess, to prove her own worth, after all, it is not about Pinson at all, which is emphatically captured by the final encounter between them.Like the illusionist (Gitlis) in the picture, our world is populated with deceptions and play-actings, and THE STORY OF ADELE H (it must be where Noah Baumbach's FRANCES HA 2012 gets its titular inspiration), further vouches for Truffaut's will power to debunk the ugly truth in his works, only this time, let it get brutally emotional under a often sombre palette from the one-and-only Néstor Almendros and incited by a compelling tour-de-force from Ms. Adjani.

"The Story of Adele H." is an account based on the life of Adele Hugo, daughter of the great writer Victor Hugo, who led a tormented and difficult life in Halifax, New Scotia where she tracked down the man of her life, a military (Bruce Robinson) who after this desperate act of the woman decided to dump her away. Will she get over this guy? No, and the film shows us an obsessive woman (stalker if you prefer) that seems to love this guy with a power and ferocity that she'll do anything to be close to him.Putting together the word disappointing along with the name of the talented director François Truffaut is almost a sinful act, and I'll try to go in another direction, but considering the mind behind the movie one can almost say that. Compared to another of his works "The Story of Adele H." seems a minor work in terms of story. Truffaut's idea was amazing, he used some of the diaries of the real Adele and added something more to the story, but almost the whole film keeps on the same path and that is the obsession of a woman for a handsome womanizer as later we find out. There are some boring parts, other less interesting parts, but nothing so compromising. To female (and a few males I think) viewers Adele's story might be awful or something that makes of a beautiful woman a mere object considering the way she's treated by this guy and all of her attempts to make him fall for her, she throws herself into so many downer and sad levels, almost to insanity that I believe many people won't care about it. Of course you can say that she acts in that way because of the period this story is set (19th century), and nowadays women simply doesn't act that way no more, self-respect among them is beyond trying to reach attention of men. She's even more complicated (but not so dramatically complex) than Catherine of "Jules & Jim", a brilliant work from Mr. Truffaut of whom I absolutely love all of his films. Isabelle Adjani's performance as Adele is great, she makes the whole film interesting, she has a powerful presence on screen, guarantying a Academy Award nomination of Best Actress (losing the award to Louise Flecther in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"); Bruce Robinson who plays Adele's love is a good actor and as the woman says to her in some moments before he walks away from her: "You're beautiful". She's right about that, he's really all that!If the plot wasn't too much focused on the obsession and Adele's stalking this guy, I would have enjoyed more. But even a minor film from Truffaut is a giant film among plenty other films. 7/10

Truffaut is usually such a high-spirited filmmaker that The Story of Adele H. comes as a great surprise. Isabelle Adjani plays a woman obsessed with a man who has no interest in her. Ultimately she convinces herself that she is in the middle of a great romance and loses touch with reality. By the end of the film she doesn't even recognize her great love anymore, since he exists far more in her mind than he ever has in her experiences. The daughter of Victor Hugo, Adele H. is desperate to create a life apart from her family, and she fixates on her imaginary love affair as her salvation. It's an odd, dark story, and Truffaut takes a determinedly direct approach to it, sacrificing some of the liveliness and cinematic flashiness of his other films but more than making up for it with a sharper focus and intensity. Adjani is brilliant. She makes no effort to win our sympathy or milk us for the pathos inherent in her situation, and the clean, even stark single-mindedness of her acting begins to take on a harsh grandeur as the film goes along. Though far from the most characteristic Truffaut film, this is one of his best.