Watch The Story of Adele H. For Free

Just what I expected

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Blistering performances.

Aware of upcoming challenges on ICM to watch as many French films and 70's flicks in a month, I took a look at the 70's credits of auteur François Truffaut. Getting Small Change from a local shop, I searched on Amazon for a tantalising second title,and got set to meet Adele H.View on the film:Taking 7 years to reach the screen after plans for it to be a grand-scale epic starring either Jeanne Moreau or Catherine Deneuve, the limitations placed on co-writer/(with regular collaborators Suzanne Schiffman and Jean Gruault) directing auteur François Truffaut to go small-scale actually benefit the title,as Truffaut reunites with cinematographer Jacqueline Guyot and weaves the camera along the crumbling 1860's streets of Halifax, Nova Scotia,where Adele's red dress stands out like a shimmering light. Working on their second historical/Costume Drama after the magnificent The Wild Child, Truffaut and Guyot expand on the classical elegance of Child with New Wave stylisation seamlessly blended in of an eye-catching crane shot across a see-through building, and icy waves of overlapping images bringing to shore the drowned memories of Adele.Telling the story from Adele's own diary,the writers cleverly adapt her words with the themes across all of Truffaut's work,with the young Adele being detached from her parents in Nova Scotia,and desperately grasping for a love that will never make her fulfilled. 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. H.

Did anyone else think Pinson intended to kill Adele on that Barbados back street, until he realized that he had finally driven her insane? Bruce Robinson plays the wormy cad to a T, but amazing kudos go to Adjani, as the deeply suffering heart of what Truffaut dubbed his "love story for one." I realize that Adele was an obsessive, masochistic, lying stalker. But she also suffered from the vicarious trauma of her sister's drowning in addition to probably having a tendency toward mental illness. What a case study in the truism that money can't buy you love!Let's not trivialize this great film by reducing it to a "fatal attraction" for the 19th century. What woman hasn't found herself in the position of having given herself to a man only to be callously cast aside?Truffaut beautifully captures the ineffable helplessness of being in this excruciating position.I first saw this film back in 1975 as an undergraduate at Penn State, while majoring in English. I remember telling a poet friend, "I wish I wrote as much as Adele did!" I'd like to believe I have aged as admirably as this powerful work.

Guilt or Passion? 8 Is guilt or passion the driving force behind Adele's obsession for Lt Pinson? I think the former. Maybe it's her re-current dreams of her older sister's tragic death by drowning, maybe it's her conscious guilt over that accident--she wished it because this sister was her father's dear favorite---but for me it's her ENIGMATIC SMILE while viewing her beloved's sexual encounter and her subsequent gift of a prostitute which argue even more deeply for guilt.For how can deep passion cut itself off from the body without abstracting itself? If her love was real, concrete, it was embodied. At that SMILE'S precise moment, passion/love must become guilt/penitence. Or, if this love started with guilt/penitence and Pinson is simply a stand-in for her dead sister, than all that can be left now is suffering. Because it is now brutally clear that the love she seeks--to heal her guilt--has been denied. The physical bond is severed. Pinson has stripped Adele of her body--and thus of her key to response. Now guilt has killed passion and has shut down possibility. Only suffering remains, and Adele's downward spiral into self-destruction has begun. Pinson's cold indifference, selfishness, and womanizing are now mere penance, which she can only passively endure. She may survive--and does, but not as a lover, saint or mystic.

Well made and competent, Truffaut's "Adele H." is, at it's most basic level, the story of a stalker. 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. And the period details (like the soldier's uniforms) gives the film a very realistic feel without being overbearing.The ending is a bit of a let down because you kind of expect some kind of melodramatic ending considering all that Adele went through. To realize (SPOILER HERE) that she did go back to France and led an OK life until her death in 1915 is, despite the fact that it's true, anti-climatic. I think it would have been more satisfying to see how she was when she went back to France. Did she recover completely? Was she still somewhat obessessed? We simply get a quickie voiceover that feels like a cheat.