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