L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975)

L’Histoire d’Adèle H. is a French romantic film drama first released in 1975, directed by François Truffaut.  The film is based on a book by Frances V. Guille and stars Isabelle Adjani, Bruce Robinson, Sylvia Marriott, Reubin Dorey and Joseph Blatchley.  It has also been released under the title: The Story of Adele H..  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Adèle Hugo, the second daughter of the celebrated French writer Victor Hugo, arrives in Nova Scotia in 1863.  Living under an assumed name, she tracks down her former lover, an attractive young army officer, Lieutenant Pinson.  Although Pinson insists that their affair is over and spurns her advances, Adèle clings to her love.  Her passion turns into an intense self-destructive obsession...

After the two year hiatus that followed his Oscar winning La Nuit américaine (1973), director François Truffaut was keen to make another period drama - on a grander scale than his earlier L’Enfant sauvage (1969) and Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971).   When his faithful screenwriter Jean Gruault suggested adapting The Diary of Adèle Hugo,  a recently published book edited by the American academic Frances Vernor Guille, he could not have been more enthusiastic.  Unfortunately, Truffaut’s film production company was facing financial difficulties and the director had difficulty finding a backer to bankroll what would have been his most lavish production.  What was conceived as a blockbuster on the scale of Gone With the Wind, a three-hour epic studded with grand historical set-pieces, ended up as a far more modest work which focused exclusively on its central character.  The other obstacle that Truffaut had to overcome was obtaining the rights to Guille’s book. At first, Guille agreed to sell the rights on condition that she was hired as co-screenwriter, at a fee that would have made the production unviable.  By appealing directly to Jean Hugo, Adèle Hugo’s grand-nephew, Truffaut finally mananged to persuade Guille to take a more reasonable line.

L’Histoire d’Adèle H. is arguably Truffaut’s purest, and perhaps cruellest, exploration of the amour fou, that obsessive, destructive love that is central to the director’s oeuvre and which manifests itself, in subtly differing ways, in all of his films.  Truffaut’s most famous treatment of the amour fou is his New Wave masterpiece Jules et Jim (1962), although this film is somewhat atypical, lacking the abject bleakness, bordering on despair, that predominates in his later films.  The sunniness and apparent frivolity of Jules et Jim make a stark contrast with the solemnity and darkness of L’Histoire d’Adèle H.  The latter is the most extreme portrayal of romantic obsession, one that is totally devoid of hope, an impression that is underscored by its cold wintry setting and sombre near-documentary cinematographic style.  The notion that our emotional needs can never be satisfied lies at the heart of both Truffaut’s cinema and his own personal life, and it is this fundamental tragedy of human experience that the director was able to evoke so powerfully in his films.

Initially, Truffaut considered Catherine Deneuve for the part of Adèle Hugo, but later, once the scripts had been completed and he had raised the necessary finance, he become seized by the idea of giving the role to the 19-year-old Isabelle Adjani, a rising star of the Comédie-Française.  Adjani had already appeared in a few films, most notably Claude Pinoteau’s La Gifle (1974), but she had set her sights on pursuing a theatrical career and so instantly rejected Truffaut’s offer to star in his next film.  It took a certain amount of arm-twisting and crawling before Truffaut was finally able to coerce Adjani into accepting the part, although she was insistent that she was too young for the role.  As happened in virtually every one of his films, Truffaut fell madly in love with his leading actress and saw no distinction between muse and lover, although Adjani did nothing to encourage him and even less to reciprocate his feelings.  It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Truffaut’s relationship with Adjani during the making of this film was the exact inverse of that between Adèle Hugo and her uninterested beau idéal, Pinson.  The brief sequence in which Adèle mistakes another officer (significantly played by Truffaut) for her lover hints as much.

Truffaut’s preoccupation with Adjani was just one of the challenges that the film presented.  Most of it was shot on location on the island of Guernsey, where Victor Hugo lived in exile for 15 years during the reign of Napoléon III.   Although the island proved to be a reasonably convincing substitute for Nova Scotia, with its rugged scenery and depressing lack of sunlight, its remoteness caused some difficulties for the cast and crew, and the requirement to shoot scenes in two languages (French and English) did not help matters.   Having barely survived this ordeal, the production team then had to decamp to Dakar, Senegal, to shoot the concluding scenes set in Barbados.  It was not the happiest of productions, although Truffaut was confident that his film would be well worth the effort.

Despite some initially encouraging reviews, the film met with only a lukewarm response at the French box office, where it barely sold 700 thousand tickets.  Fortunately, it performed far better on its international release, particularly in the United States, where some very positive reviews ensured its success.  Today, L’Histoire d’Adèle H. is generally less well regarded than most of Truffaut’s other romantic dramas, perhaps because it offers so little hope and fails to make its heroine much more than an object of ridicule.  The central difficulty with the film is that the spectator is uncertain how to regard the main character, sympathetically or with derision.  (It is easier to sympathise with the harangued Pinson, for all his obvious failings.)   We feel we should pity Adèle, since the pain of unrequited love is something we have all experienced, and yet the extent of her delusion, the insistency with which she pursues her former lover (stalking him across much of the New World like a Brontë-esque zombie), her lack of feeling for her father’s concern, make it hard for us to identify with her and see her for more than what she is - a sad, emotionally twisted wretch who badly needs to get a life.  

This is not to downplay the film’s technical and artistic achievements - the exquisite beauty of Nestor Almendros’s cinematography, which eloquently expresses the hopelessness of Adèle’s plight with its muted palette and stifling lack of natural light; the sad sense of longing that resonates from Maurice Jaubert’s score (written before the composer’s tragic death in 1940); and Adjani’s compelling portrayal of a girl being slowly eaten away by forces she cannot control, a performance which still ranks as one of her best.  Truffaut’s direction is as inspired and meticulous as ever, evidenced by the subtle way he distances the spectator from the heroine (for example, by framing her in the background, in doorways or windows), thereby emphasising her isolation and her inability to see beyond her delusional fantasy to the world around her, a world that offers her genuine compassion and interest.  L’Histoire d’Adèle H. is perhaps not the most engaging of Truffaut’s films, but it is one of his most haunting and disturbing, the one in which the director comes closest to exposing his troubled soul and his own incurable addiction to love.

© James Travers 2012

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