L’Histoire d’Adèle H [The Story of Adèle H] **** (1975, Isabelle Adjani, Bruce Robinson, Sylvia Marriott) – Classic Movie Review 3015

Director François Truffaut’s 1975 film about the desperate and doomed passion of the great French author Victor Hugo’s second daughter Adèle for handsome English officer Lieutenant Pinson is wonderfully lush and romantic – and deliciously doomy. Perhaps never has obsessive love been so self destructive!

Adèle falls headlong for Pinson on the island of Guernsey in the early 1860s. In 1863, calling herself Miss Lewly, she comes to Halifax to search for Pinson, who tries to make her understand that her love is hopeless. But her obsession grows, so she keeps chasing and harassing him and, though he cares not a jot for her, recklessly pursues him to Nova Scotia and Barbados, entirely regardless of his indifference.

The gorgeous Isabelle Adjani is tremendously affecting and impressive as Adèle. She was Oscar nominated and this role turned her into a star. And Bruce Robinson, later the director of Withnail and I, is suitably dashing as the obscure object of hopeless desire.

Truffaut was always attracted to the theme of the hopelessness of true love and this ultimate tale of unrequited love is romantic obsession to chill the heart. And master cinematographer Nestor Almendros makes the film look beautiful.

Also in the cast are Sylvia Marriott (the mother in Anne and Muriel), Reuben Dorey, Joseph Blatchley, Carl Hathwell, Ivry Girlis, Roger Martin, Jean-Pierre Leursse and Louise Bourder.

Basing the screenplay on the book Le Journal d’Adèle Hugo by Frances Vernor Guille, Truffaut writes with Suzanne Schiffman and Jean Gruault, who died on June 8 2015, aged 90.

Gruault wrote 25 screenplays between 1960 and 1995. His screenplay for Alain Renais’s Mon oncle d’Amérique (1980) was nominated for an Oscar and a César and won a David di Donatello Award. Other notable works include Jules and Jim (1962), co-written with François Truffaut, as well as Truffaut’s The Wild Child (1970), Anne and Muriel (1971) and The Green Room (1978).

He also contributed to Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us (1960) and The Nun (1966); Roberto Rossellini’s Vanina Vanini (1961) and The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966); Jean-Luc Godard’s Les carabiniers (1963); Chantal Akerman’s The Eighties (1983) and Golden Eighties (1986); and Resnais’s Love Unto Death (1984).

Classic Movie Review 3015