The Story of Adele H.

viewed July 28, 2000 on VHS   Full Details

I confess: I got this movie so I could watch Isabelle Adjani at age 19.  Not only did I get that satisfaction, but I watched a brilliant movie in the process.  I don't hear much said about this film in relation to its director, Francois Truffaut; and frankly, it seems quite conventional in form compared to his more innovative endeavors of the 60s.  But in its own quiet way Adele H. is a daring film, by postulating that the young daughter of Victor Hugo, who left home to cross the Atlantic in pursuit of the soldier she loved, was not so much crazy as heroic in her obsession, indeed, as revolutionary as the characters penned by her father.  Her love defied the conventions of the period and the expectations placed upon her as a female; by the end of the film, in the final encounter between Adele and her reluctant soldier lover, we see that her tragic story was deliberately, from the very beginning, authored by none other than her.  

None of this speculative biography would be so convincing if it were not for Adjani's courageous performance as Adele.  With a blue-eyed, obsessive glare, she wills her way across an ocean, through wild briars and over metal gates, enduring dirt and disease to make her statement of love (however quizzical).  It is by no means an easy performance to understand fully -- it is challenging, if not overwhelming.  I'm surprised Emily Watson didn't cite it as an inspiration for her own performance in Breaking the Waves.  Like Watson's Bess, Adjani's Adele sought a purity through her love, the kind that most teenagers have and that inevitably leads to some kind of undoing, but she takes it beyond what most people would ever dream of.  She takes it way outside, for everyone to see, and she's not afraid of it one bit. 

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