Daily Archives: Wednesday, June 29, 2016

  • The Story of Adèle H

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’histoire d’Adèle H

    François Truffaut (1975)

    The paintings that accompany the opening credits – dark skies and seas, forbidding castles and so on – suggest something emotionally epic in prospect.  The Story of Adèle H is the story of Victor Hugo’s daughter Adèle (Isabelle Adjani) and her obsessive love for a British naval officer called Pinson (Bruce Robinson).   We learn that they first met – and had a brief relationship – while Victor Hugo, with his family, was living in political exile on Guernsey.  The film begins at the point at which Adèle has crossed the Atlantic to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Pinson is now posted, and it describes the extreme lengths to which she goes to win him.   I’d never seen the film and, largely because of Pauline Kael’s admiration for it, had always wanted to.  It’s true that, if I’d been that keen, I could have made more effort to track it down before now.  Still, thirty-five years is a long time to look forward to something.  There’s a sizeable risk of being disappointed, and I was.  This is an extraordinary story but, if you know what that story is, it’s not an extraordinary telling of it.   The Maurice Jaubert music is very striking and the visual design of the film, photographed by Nestor Almendros, is impressive – as Kael says, you’re never conscious of seeing sky, not after those opening titles anyway.  The claustrophobia in Adèle’s dreams is relatively weak, however.  She lies in bed tossing and turning and wakes startled from nightmares of entrapment and drowning – the choice of imagery is far from surprising.

    I knew this was a tale of unrequited love and that Adèle made herself ridiculous and alarming in her entreaties to Pinson (she claims in letters home to her parents that they’re married, she knows he’s a womaniser so buys him a whore for a night, she stuffs a cushion under her dress to pretend she’s carrying his child, etc).   What I hadn’t realised was just how much Adèle and Pinson see of each other:  I’d expected her mania to be shored up in isolation from him.  In an early scene he calls round at Adèle’s lodgings and, in the exchange that follows, we learn from Pinson (although he may not be truthful) that he was discouraged from continuing his relationship with Adèle in Europe solely by the hostility of her parents.   The snooty, cold-blooded Pinson is rather repellent; he’s not (as Pauline Kael suggests) insignificant but his reptilian good looks are charmless.  (Bruce Robinson, best known as the writer-director of Withnail and I, has a hint of Jean-Pierre Léaud about him – and, bizarrely, a hint of Murray Melvin too – although he lacks the humour of either.)  The fact that Pinson isn’t magnetic to the audience, while it isn’t necessarily damaging to the film, does make us much more objective towards him than Adèle is.  And the effect of this – because you don’t feel anything of what she’s feeling – is that we tend to watch her as a case study rather than engage with her as a woman.

    The only sequence in Adèle H that’s really absorbing occurs when Adèle goes to a theatre – to spy on Pinson and his latest paramour – where a hypnotist is performing.  This is partly because of the dramatic shaping – as Adèle watches the act onstage, it’s this that becomes the focus of her single-mindedness.  She goes to his dressing room to ask the hypnotist (Ivry Gitlis) if he can change someone’s mind – or, specifically, make a man marry a woman against his will.  The question is powerful because it’s a rare instance of Adèle conferring with someone in the world outside her head (other than Pinson) as a means of making progress in her crazy quest – and also because it underlines the limits of the craziness.  In resorting to a quasi-magician to deliver what she wants, Adèle in effect admits that she’s not capable of getting it herself or by natural means – and demonstrates that she isn’t deluded into believing that deep down Pinson feels for her what she feels for him.  In making her request (supported by the offer of a large fee) to the hypnotist, she’s explicit that the man in question doesn’t love the woman in question.  If the heroine was deluded and the film led to her realisation of the truth Adèle H would be a much less unusual piece.  But Truffaut’s more original approach puts huge pressure on the actress playing Adèle.  Isabelle Adjani, only nineteen at the time, is committed and often impressive but she isn’t amazing or illuminating:  you never feel, ‘Yes, of course – that’s what it must be like to feel that way’.

    The final meeting of Pinson and Adèle in Barbados is a real letdown.  (Adèle has followed him there from Canada.)  I’d always assumed that the moment when she sees him and doesn’t see him – after a lengthy interval, during which her obsession has become a passionate abstraction and has eclipsed the individual who triggered it – would be an almost accidental, brief non-encounter.  Instead, Truffaut has Pinson (anxious that Adèle’s going to continue to interfere with his military career and now his marriage too) follow his stalker until they come face to face.  He actually calls her name before she moves on regardless.     The scene is anti-climactic because Adèle’s failing to notice Pinson is presented from his point of view, and he’s of no interest to us.

    One of the things I didn’t get at all was what her father’s international celebrity meant to Adèle.  Both the interview with Truffaut in the BFI programme note and Pauline Kael’s review make a good deal of this (and it must explain the load of biographical information about Victor Hugo at the end of the film, with photographs of the vast crowds who turned out for his funeral in Paris in 1885).  Kael suggests that Adèle’s wasting her psychic (and physical) energies on an object of desire as worthless as Pinson reflects a determination to prostrate herself extremely and humiliatingly before him – as if, as the daughter of the world’s most famous man, she has to go further than anyone else in fruitless self-abasement.  Maybe so; but I think this is a credible and interesting idea deriving more from the biographical facts than from what Truffaut and Isabelle Adjani suggest.   (I didn’t understand at all why the bookseller, in the hope of ingratiating himself with Adèle, gives her as a present Les Misérables:  she’s furious and storms out of the bookshop.)

    Sylvia Marriott as Adèle’s landlady is adequate, Clive Gillingham better than adequate as a bank clerk and Joseph Blatchley really good as the Halifax bookseller who quietly carries a torch for Adele.  Otherwise, the acting by the English-speaking actors – the other officers, a doctor, Pinson’s fiancée – is atrocious.  The speech rhythms often sound too modern (this is also true, right at the start, of a disagreement between an official and a passenger disembarking from the same ship as Adèle, although it’s effective how Truffaut switches from this to Adèle, as she begins her journey into Halifax, as the centre of attention).  Yet at the same time the performing style is antique – it’s like the bad acting of British films of the forties and fifties where performers make clear the social type they’re interpreting but speak their lines woodenly.  The subtitling, in the early part of the film at least, was some of the worst I’ve seen, with  a number of lines omitted and a good many more subtitles out-of-sync with the words being spoken on screen.

    27 February 2011

  • The Station Agent

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tom McCarthy (2003)

    Finbar (Fin) McBride, a solitary, thirtyish man with a passion for railways, works in a shop in Hoboken that sells and repairs model trains.  The shop owner dies suddenly.  Fin loses his job but inherits from the older man a piece of land in the back of beyond:  the plot includes a disused train depot and it’s here that Fin makes his home.  The place that he moves to is called Newfoundland – symbolically apt but a real place in New Jersey.  Shortly after arriving there, Fin twice nearly gets knocked down by an out-of-control car, driven by a neighbour, Olivia Harris.  An artist in her early forties, Olivia is trying to come to terms with the death of her young son two years previously and the end of her marriage which followed it, although this isn’t the cause of her dangerous driving.  Just outside the train depot, a Cuban-American called Joe Aramos runs a roadside drinks-and-snacks truck, owned by his father, who is recovering from illness.  Olivia is a regular customer of Joe’s, buying the truck’s supposed speciality café con leche, although he’d like their relationship to be more.  Fin is anxious to keep himself to himself but both Olivia and Joe take a determined interest in him and a tentative friendship develops among the three of them.  Other people of note in this sparsely populated film are Cleo, an African-American fourth or fifth grader who shares Fin’s enthusiasm for railways, and Emily, a young woman who works in the local library.  Each of these five characters seems alone – even Emily, who is carrying the baby of her slobby boyfriend.

    Although this is an original screenplay (by the director), the collection of solitaries has the whiff of a stage play in which the dramatis personae, each with her or his particular cross to bear, are stuck in the same place – a single set – together.  Tom McCarthy makes good use of the railroad tracks, along which Fin walks regularly and trains pass less often, but this is a movie that doesn’t move much.  On the rare occasions that something visually dynamic occurs, it seems a bit desperate – especially the repeat of Olivia’s comically losing control of the car and falling over when she first visits Fin at the depot.  The Station Agent has some well-written dialogue and the actors are strong but it would be a wan, unremarkable story if it weren’t for the fact that Fin McBride is a dwarf, that he seeks isolation because people stare or laugh at his appearance, and that he is played by Peter Dinklage, who is himself achondroplastic.

    You’re conscious of watching Dinklage’s performance differently from anyone else’s.  You assume that he must be reflecting his own experience of being gawped or sniggered at; whereas it doesn’t occur to you that Patricia Clarkson (Olivia) or Bobby Cannavale (Joe) or even the ten-year-old Raven Goodwin, as the ungainly, overweight Cleo, may be drawing on autobiographical misery to bring their character to life.   Fortunately, Peter Dinklage is subtle and incisive enough to leave you in no doubt that he is, as well as being an unusually short actor, an unusually good one.  In comparison with Fin/Dinklage’s unhappiness, Olivia’s tragedy feels conventional.  I find Patricia Clarkson more engaging when she’s being drily humorous than when she’s emoting:  she has opportunities for both here but more of the latter.  Olivia sinks into depression after the brief, unexpected reappearance of the husband from whom she’s separated.  When she learns that the woman he’s now with is pregnant, Olivia tries to commit suicide – on the same night that Fin, who’s also by now very depressed, gets drunk, keels over on the railroad tracks just as a rare train is approaching and, when he realises what’s happening, appears to welcome death.  He wakes up next morning to find he’s survived and goes straight from the tracks to Olivia’s house, where he finds her in time for her life to be saved too.

    In the penultimate scene of The Station Agent, Fin goes to Cleo’s school to talk to her class about trains, as the girl has urged him to do.  It’s a poor sequence:  one of the kids quickly interrupts Fin to ask how tall he is; the class teacher apologises and takes the boy out.  This doesn’t work at a realistic level:  it’s not clear whether the teacher did or didn’t tell the class beforehand not to make comments about Fin’s appearance – it’s hard to believe it if she didn’t and, if she did, she needs to react to the boy’s ignoring her instructions as the determined disobedience it is.  You don’t get any sense either of how Fin or Cleo feels after the talk – it’s there simply to show Fin plucking up the courage to appear in public in this way.  In the final scene, Fin, Olivia and Joe are spending the evening together, chatting easily.  This conversation is much more effective – thanks to good lines, the actors’ delivery of them and the fact that the film ends unexpectedly at this point.  Likeable as the scene is, though, the suggestion that social companionship is helping Fin and particularly Olivia to move on is too facile.

    This was the second time I’d seen The Station Agent (the first time must have been not that long after its original release).  I’m not sure why I decided to record it from television but one of the pleasures of this repeat viewing was seeing actors who I’d forgotten were in the film and whose later work I’ve enjoyed.  Michelle Williams is wonderfully vivid and natural as Emily; John Slattery registers in a cameo as Olivia’s ex-husband; as Joe, Bobby Cannavale has a great blend of warmth, empathetic humour and sensitivity.  Joe’s loneliness is more interesting than Olivia’s because it’s less obviously explicable.  Cannavale makes something touching out of Joe’s concerns about the ill health of his father (who’s never seen) and the neediness that underlies Joe’s tenacious sociability.

    17-18 November 2014

Posts navigation