L'histoire d'Adèle H.
Tags: insanity, romantic

Plot synopsis:
In 1863, the American Civil War is still raging and Great Britain and France have yet to enter into the conflict. For the past year British troops have been stationed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, carefully checking European passengers disembarking from foreign ships. The beautiful Adèle Hugo (Isabelle Adjani), the second daughter of Victor Hugo, makes it through and takes a carriage into Halifax. Traveling under the assumed name of Miss Lewly, Adèle finds accommodations at a boarding house run by Mr. and Mrs. Saunders.
Adèle finds a notary and inquires about a British officer, Lieutenant Pinson (Bruce Robinson), with whom she's had a relationship. Later that day Adèle sees Pinson at a book shop. When she learns that Mr. Saunders will be attending a military dinner which Pinson is likely to attend, Adèle asks him to deliver a letter from her—a love letter announcing her arrival. While showing some old photographs to Mrs. Saunders, she talks about her older sister Léopoldine Hugo, who died in a drowning accident at the age of nineteen many years ago just after being married. When Mr. Saunders returns from the dinner, he tells her that he gave Pinson her letter but he did not reply. That night Adèle has nightmares about drowning.
The next day Adèle writes to her parents, telling them that she must be with her beloved Pinson and that they are planning to marry, but she will wait for their formal consent. She spends her evenings writing in her journal about her life and her love for Pinson. "I'll be able to win him over through gentleness," she writes. Pinson goes to the boarding house, where he tells Adèle that she must leave Halifax and stop following him. Adèle believes that if they marry, all his concerns will be resolved. Pinson knows that her parents do not approve of him and his heavy gambling debts. Adèle tries to persuade him, telling him that she's rejected another marriage proposal, threatens to expose him and ruin his military career, and even offers him money for his gambling debts, but he remains unmoved.
In the coming days, Adèle continues writing in her journal, convinced that she is Pinson's wife in spirit. She tries to conjure the ghost of her dead sister to help her. One night she follows Pinson to the home of his mistress, where she watches them make love. Undeterred, Adèle continues her writing, and her behavior becomes more eccentric. Mr. Whistler (Joseph Blatchley), the kind bookseller who provides her with writing paper, shows an interest in her. As she leaves his book shop, she faints from exhaustion. Mr. Whistler visits her at the boarding house and brings her paper, but she refuses to see him. Doctor Murdock (Roger Martin) visits and diagnoses a mild case of pleurisy. He notices one of her letters is addressed to "Victor Hugo" and informs Mrs. Saunders of the true identity of her boarder.
Adèle's obsession grows stronger. One day she writes to her parents telling them that she has married Pinson and that from now on, she should be addressed as Madame Pinson. Upon receiving the news, Victor Hugo posts an announcement of the marriage in his local paper. The news reaches Pinson's colonel. After Pinson writes Victor Hugo to explain that he will never marry Adèle, Hugo writes to his daughter, urging her to return home to Guernsey. Adèle responds to her father's letter with more fantasy, urging her parents to accept Pinson.
Having learned of Adèle's identity, Mr. Whistler offers her a gift of her father's books. She responds in anger and paranoia. She hires a prostitute as a gift for Pinson. She follows him to a theater to see a hypnotist act, where she is inspired to think that she can hypnotize Pinson into loving her; she is forced to abandon this plan once she learns that the hypnosis was faked. Adèle begins to go mad with despair. She goes to the father of Pinson's fiancé and claims that he is married to her and that she is carrying his child. The father ends the engagement. She finds Pinson once more, and he again rebukes her, calling her ridiculous. After leaving the boarding house, Adèle continues to deteriorate. She wanders the streets in torn clothes talking to herself.
In February 1864 Pinson is shipped out to Barbados, and a destitute Adèle follows him. Now married, Pinson learns that Adèle is in Barbados claiming to be his wife. Concerned for her, Pinson searches for her and finds her wandering the streets in rags. When he tries to confront her, Adèle does not acknowledge or recognize him. Helped by a kind former slave, Adèle returns to Paris, where the French Third Republic has been established. Her father places her in an asylum in Saint-Mandé, where she lives for the next forty years. She gardens, plays the piano and writes in her journal. Adèle Hugo died in Paris in 1915 at the age of 85.

Review: Without the film ever leaving the secular world, Adele Hugo descends to Hell and Truffaut finds the horror of her journey in the most mundane settings and gestures.
Not because there was any doubt about Adjani's acting, but because casting someone who was arguably the most beautiful actress in the world as a character driven mad by unrequited love raised a potential credibility issue.
And could someone like that elicit sympathy from the average viewer.But Truffaut knew what he was doing because Adjani's Adele Hugo is 100% convincing.
Adjani's breathtaking beauty actually is an asset as Truffaut wants us convinced that the world holds open unlimited possibilities for Adele if only see can let go of her obsession.
Adjani plays the character with such intensity that you are finally relieved when Adele's madness has reached the stage where she is no longer aware of her own suffering.Apparently Adele Hugo (Victor Hugo's daughter) had other issues going on well before her obsessive quest for Lt. Pinson's love began.
Visually, Truffaut's stays with blacks, browns and blues; with much of each frame filled with shadows; not exactly dreary but consistent with a character who has found little non-fantasy happiness during her life.The camera loves Adjani, a good thing as she is on screen for over 90% of the film.
Isabelle Adjani plays the title role, that of Adele Hugo, daughter of the great French writer, a woman obsessively in love with an English army lieutenant who doesn't want her.
Adjani's sensuous beauty and her intense and passionate nature command the screen and we are drawn to identify with her as she spirals toward madness as her abject pleas of love are unrequited.
It is easy to see how something like this can lead to complete madness.Memorable is a little story within the larger tale, that of the fraudulent hypnotist whom Adele thinks might be able to turn Pinson's indifference into love.(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!).
"I'm still young and yet it sometimes seems to me that I've reached the autumn of my life." This tragic statement, taken from the diaries of Adele Hugo, daughter of Victor, is both the doomed statement of a young girl driven mad by love, and an ironic testament to the performance of a then 20 year old Isabelle Adjani.
Young Adele Hugo arrives at a camp in Nova Scotia seeking out her great love Lieutenant Pinson (Bruce Robinson), who she had embarked on a love affair with and whose potential marriage had been frowned upon.What may have become a rather frustrating depiction of a desperate woman in love, Truffaut takes special care to create an air of Greek tragedy, as we witness the emotional deterioration of our protagonist, and her desperate pursuit of the unwilling Lieutenant Pinson.
Adele herself, as depicted in the picture, is a time-bomb of emotions, giving every ounce of her strength into the tidal wave of pure love she feels - possibly a result of her father's grand romantic poems and novels - so anything less from Adjani wouldn't haven't done Adele justice.This is a different kind of work to what I've previously seen from Truffaut - I'm more familiar with his New Wave productions.
But whether this is an ode to tragic intellectualism, or a human story that grabbed Truffaut's heart, I'll never know, but this is a gently haunting tale, and one that will make you want to personally open the eyes of Adele to the possibilities that are all around her, were she not so swept away by madness and love.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com.
In this movie she is simply one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.She plays the tormented daughter of Victor Hugo.
Summary: A talented writer, Adele Hugo, becomes obsessed with her former lover , the indebted and womanizing Liutenant Pinson.
Adjani actually shows us the thoughts and rationality of her character; we first see Adele as an intelligent, innocent young woman who somehow, some way, becomes slimmed down to a stub of passion in Pinson's presence.
The director filmed this scene with the door blocking half the screen, which made the viewer feel, like Adele, very cut off from Pinson.
It concerns an unrequited love between Adele H., the daughter of Victor Hugo, and a member of the English military stationed there.
French actress Isabelle Adjani superbly plays a woman whose love is rejected and who inches down a slippery slope to madness.
It was also interesting to learn this sidelight about Victor Hugo.Most of all, I enjoyed this film because it raises the question of whether its main character is crazy to begin with or whether, being possessed of such a strong love, it was a natural progression to madness when it was rejected.
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.
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..
Isabele Adjani (also Nosferatu 1979) brings the role of Adele to life superbly.This is a brilliant film!
Adjani performance sometimes is very disturbing,and she really shines as this dark,genuine,amazing young woman,Adele H is not the most popular of Truffautt movies ,but IMHO is his most solid work,you don't need to be his "fan" to appreciate it..
The highlight of this movie is, of course, the performance of Isabelle Adjani (who plays the title character).
Isabelle Adjani's sublime performance - and, we cannot deny, her mesmerizing beauty - as Victor Hugo's daughter, Adèle, blindly in love with a Lieutenant (played by Bruce Robinson, who wrote "The Killing Fields" and directed "Jennifer 8"), are the greatest force behind this film: Isabelle's face is one of the most expressive in film history, and she makes us feel all the sorrow of the tragic Adèle with a single look.
I think you need to be of a certain character to really understand the madness of the protagonist.A rewarding movie experience and Isabelle Adjani's portrayal of Adele Hugo is haunting and mesmerising.
This is a true story about Adèle Hugo, the younger daughter of the famous 19th century French author Victor Hugo (1802-1885, best known today as the author of LES MISERABLES, which is causing an even greater stir now that the musical show has been filmed and nominated for several Oscars).
(No French young person today who has not made extra effort even knows the names of the famous French authors and poets of the 20th century, much less their works, apart from the noxious and revolting Sartre, whose poisonous influence lives on like an ineradicable invasion of Japanese knotweed, choking all the good plants around it to death.) In this film, the 20 year-old Isabelle Adjani gives the performance of her life, a harrowing, wholly compelling and convincing study of a disturbed girl who goes from obsessive love into detachment from reality and thence into total madness.
The causes of Adèle's madness will never be entirely comprehended, as it was all too long ago (in the 1860s), but Francois Truffaut, who directed this miniature masterwork, hints at her being obsessively haunted by the death from drowning of her beautiful older sister Leopoldine at the age of 19.
No wonder Victor Hugo's last words on his deathbed were: 'I see a black light!' This film is a searing emotional experience, largely because of Adjani's incredible performance, where one forgets entirely that she is Adjani and believes one is in the presence of the demented Adèle herself, robed in all her despair and bespangled with the glittering hopelessness of a mind which is disintegrating like an atom in a cyclotron, all before our horrified eyes.
Francois Truffaut's historical tale about Victor Hugo's daughter Adele and her obsessive quest for the English soldier she loved is bittersweet and heartfelt at the same time.
It takes the true talent and caliber of a director like Truffaut to make a character such as Adele Hugo into a person that ends up being more sympathetic than deplorable.
There is a burning desire in this woman that is both disturbing and admirable at the same time.Isabelle Adjani won much acclaim for her work as Adele and it was well- deserved.
There is the constant feeling about Adele that she, being the daughter of the famous French poet Victor Hugo, is simply a spoiled rich girl using her father's money to try and buy a husband.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Story of Adele H, The (1975)*** (out of 4) Isabelle Adjani picked up an Academy Award nomination for her performance of Victor Hugo's second daughter Adele who follows Lt. Pinson (Bruce Robinson) to Halifax where her obsession with him quickly turns to madness.
I guess I'm in the middle because I thought the film was terrific to look at and we also get a great performance by Adjani but in the end it was just impossible for me to connect with this character or care a bit about her.
Truffaut takes his time telling the story and this actually builds up a pretty good atmosphere and the way he reveals the woman's obsession and how he shows it turning into this craziness is picked up very well with the slower pace.
While notable for it's atmospheric milieu depictions, sterling production design by French production designer Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko, cinematography by Spanish cinematographer Néstor Almendros (1930-1992), costume design by costume designer Jacqueline Guyot, fine editing by French film editors Martine Barraqué and Yann Dedet and prominent use of colors, this character-driven and narrative-driven period piece depicts a scrutinizing study of character and contains a good score by French composer Maurice Jaubert (1900-1940).This historic, tragic and romantic late 19th century drama from the mid-1970s about a young and cultivated woman's afflicting and obsessive infatuation with a British officer she has chosen as her one and only, which is one of Francois Truffaut's most complicated and ambitious productions, is impelled and reinforced by it's cogent narrative structure, substantial character development and the gripping and internal acting performance by French actress Isabelle Adjani.
A cinematographic, literary and psychological love-story from the mid-1970s which gained, among other awards, the NSFC Award for Best Actress Isabelle Adjani at the 10th National Society of Film Critics Awards in 1975..
The first time I saw this film (twenty years ago) the thing that impressed me the most was Isabelle Adjani's portrayal of Adele, the natural way in which she conveyed her character's emotions.
I credit that to Adjani's talent and the director's vision.The final scene punched me emotionally and spoke volumes without any of the characters uttering a word to each other: Adele, her mind lost by now, passing by Lt. Pinson without even recognizing him - so consumed with her obsession and grief for her lost love that she forgot who was the cause of her torment.
This is an incredibly sad movie to watch because you know that Adele was a REAL person who lived an incredibly screwed up and sad life.
Slowly, she moves from a form of Obsessive-Compulsive disorder to Schizophrenia and it is especially apparent in the last portion of the movie.I really liked Isabelle Adjani's acting--she and the director (Truffaut) really pulled you into her world and it seemed quite poignant.
That the stalker is the daughter of Victor Hugo simply adds to the morbid curiousity of it all.Adjani is pretty in a simple way which lends itself well to the story.
As the British soldier who is the object of Adele's all consuming passion, Bruce Robinson is callow enough that it makes you wonder why she would follow him all over the "new world" for him.I especially like the mixing of both English and French especially in the scenes in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
8 Is guilt or passion the driving force behind Adele's obsession for Lt Pinson?
But what Adele ignored is that the handsome Pinson, was a seducer and she was the love of his life as long as he lived in Guernesey.
Isabelle Adjani plays a woman obsessed with a man who has no interest in her.
Long before Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction, there was Isabelle Adjani playing Adele Hugo, daughter of the famous writer, Victor Hugo, and completely crazy about Lieutenant Pinson, a man she's determined to marry or else ruin.There's not much to say about this movie.
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.
Adjani plays Adele Hugo, the second daughter of author Victor Hugo.
We've sensed from the very beginning that Adele is a little mad and that knowledge gives weight to what she does for the rest of the film.She is undeterred by his brush-off and begins writing bogus letters back home the she and Pinson are in the throws of a love affair and later she writes of their marriage.
To look at Adele is to understand the commonality of all of Truffaut's characters who are not led by plot but are urged on by their personalities, their obsessions and their emotions.
Adele is unstable from the beginning (though it is not very apparent) and Pinson rejection fuels her madness and consumes her for the rest of her life.Truffaut isn't interested in pushing Adele into a simple-minded role as a sympathetic waif, his characters were always more complex than that.