The Story of Adele H.

1975 "What kind of woman would wait her whole life for one man...? And what kind of man would deny her...?"
7.2| 1h36m| PG| en| More Info
Released: 22 December 1975 Released
Producted By: Les Films du Carrosse
Country: France
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Info

Adèle Hugo, daughter of renowned French writer Victor Hugo, falls in love with British soldier Albert Pinson while living in exile off the coast of England. Though he spurns her affections, she follows him to Nova Scotia and takes on the alias of Adèle Lewly. Albert continues to reject her, but she remains obsessive in her quest to win him over.

Watch Online

The Story of Adele H. (1975) is now streaming with subscription on Prime Video

Director

François Truffaut

Production Companies

Les Films du Carrosse

AD
AD

Watch Free for 30 Days

Stream on any device, 30-day free trial
Watch Now
The Story of Adele H. Videos and Images
View All

The Story of Adele H. Audience Reviews

ThiefHott Too much of everything
Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!
Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
robert-temple-1 This is a true story about Adèle Hugo, the younger daughter of the famous 19th century French author Victor Hugo (1802-1885, best known today as the author of LES MISERABLES, which is causing an even greater stir now that the musical show has been filmed and nominated for several Oscars). She was named after her mother, who was also called Adèle. This is a passionate and intensely tragic tale which is well known to all cultured French people over the age of forty, who were educated in the days before the French education system collapsed into a pile of wreckage even more shattered than the rubble of the British and American education systems. (No French young person today who has not made extra effort even knows the names of the famous French authors and poets of the 20th century, much less their works, apart from the noxious and revolting Sartre, whose poisonous influence lives on like an ineradicable invasion of Japanese knotweed, choking all the good plants around it to death.) In this film, the 20 year-old Isabelle Adjani gives the performance of her life, a harrowing, wholly compelling and convincing study of a disturbed girl who goes from obsessive love into detachment from reality and thence into total madness. The real Adèle was by no means beautiful, as the photos of her exhibited recently at the Victor Hugo House in the Marais in Paris make clear. Adjani, on the other hand, is ravishing, and how the vain and narcissistic Lieutenant Pinson whom she adores can resist her is the only weakness to the film. The causes of Adèle's madness will never be entirely comprehended, as it was all too long ago (in the 1860s), but Francois Truffaut, who directed this miniature masterwork, hints at her being obsessively haunted by the death from drowning of her beautiful older sister Leopoldine at the age of 19. We see scenes of Adjani writhing in agony in her bed, in the grip of nightmares, calling out that they must not continue to keep Leopoldine's clothes preserved in her trunk at home. Is Adèle afraid of drowning? Is she touched by the terror of death? Does she feel suffocated by the fame of her father? Did she pick up from her father, as if by contagion, his own obsessive grief at Leopoldine's death? Or was she just born to madness? We shall doubtless never know. But having been seduced by the French Lieutenant (and this presumably also inspired THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN by John Fowles) and having given herself to him, 'by giving my body I give also my soul, and it is forever'. The guilt and, according to her faith, the sin, of allowing herself to be defiled in the flesh seems to have contributed to the resultant mania. Adèle then becomes manically fixated upon Lieutenant Pinson and follows him across the Atlantic to Halifax in Nova Scotia here his 16th Hussars have been stationed, and later still to the Island of Barbados in the Caribbean to which the Hussars were transferred. She thus became a primordial stalker, whose masochistic tendencies extended as far as paying a prostitute to go to Pinson, with a note to him saying it is with her compliments 'because you deserve all women'. As a study in female psychology gone wrong, they don't come more intense than this. Can one really blame the heartless Pinson for finding his cast-off mistress to be 'trouble' and wanting to escape her? Which came first, the casting-off or the mania? We do not know that either, nor will anyone. The film is made in a claustrophobic manner, with subdued colour, confined sets, and a darkness reminiscent of that found in all of Victor Hugo's own paintings, which lack all sunlight, and are extraordinarily gloomy, just as gloomy, in fact, as his house in Paris, with its dark 'Chinese Room' and even darker inner chambers, culminating in his funereal bedroom at the back. No wonder Victor Hugo's last words on his deathbed were: 'I see a black light!' This film is a searing emotional experience, largely because of Adjani's incredible performance, where one forgets entirely that she is Adjani and believes one is in the presence of the demented Adèle herself, robed in all her despair and bespangled with the glittering hopelessness of a mind which is disintegrating like an atom in a cyclotron, all before our horrified eyes. Truffaut made a quiet masterpiece, one which has all the qualities of Edvard Munch's silent 'Scream'. By way of epilogue I might say that there is an Adèle Hugo alive today, and she even has a charming sister named Leopoldine, who did not drown at the age of 19 but is still very much alive. They are great-grandchildren of Victor Hugo, two of the seven children (two sons and five daughters) of the famous French 20th century artist Jean Hugo by his second wife (he had no children by his first wife, also a famous French artist, Valentine Hugo, whose maiden name was Gross). And so the names live on and the family lives on, trailing their traditions and their creative works behind them in their collective wake like a convoy of ships which drops buoys to mark its route across the troublous seas of creativity.
Rodrigo Amaro "The Story of Adele H." is an account based on the life of Adele Hugo, daughter of the great writer Victor Hugo, who led a tormented and difficult life in Halifax, New Scotia where she tracked down the man of her life, a military (Bruce Robinson) who after this desperate act of the woman decided to dump her away. Will she get over this guy? No, and the film shows us an obsessive woman (stalker if you prefer) that seems to love this guy with a power and ferocity that she'll do anything to be close to him.Putting together the word disappointing along with the name of the talented director François Truffaut is almost a sinful act, and I'll try to go in another direction, but considering the mind behind the movie one can almost say that. Compared to another of his works "The Story of Adele H." seems a minor work in terms of story. Truffaut's idea was amazing, he used some of the diaries of the real Adele and added something more to the story, but almost the whole film keeps on the same path and that is the obsession of a woman for a handsome womanizer as later we find out. There are some boring parts, other less interesting parts, but nothing so compromising. To female (and a few males I think) viewers Adele's story might be awful or something that makes of a beautiful woman a mere object considering the way she's treated by this guy and all of her attempts to make him fall for her, she throws herself into so many downer and sad levels, almost to insanity that I believe many people won't care about it. Of course you can say that she acts in that way because of the period this story is set (19th century), and nowadays women simply doesn't act that way no more, self-respect among them is beyond trying to reach attention of men. She's even more complicated (but not so dramatically complex) than Catherine of "Jules & Jim", a brilliant work from Mr. Truffaut of whom I absolutely love all of his films. Isabelle Adjani's performance as Adele is great, she makes the whole film interesting, she has a powerful presence on screen, guarantying a Academy Award nomination of Best Actress (losing the award to Louise Flecther in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"); Bruce Robinson who plays Adele's love is a good actor and as the woman says to her in some moments before he walks away from her: "You're beautiful". She's right about that, he's really all that!If the plot wasn't too much focused on the obsession and Adele's stalking this guy, I would have enjoyed more. But even a minor film from Truffaut is a giant film among plenty other films. 7/10
jcappy 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.
Nirannah Summary: A talented writer, Adele Hugo, becomes obsessed with her former lover , the indebted and womanizing Liutenant Pinson. Her love for him consumes her entire life and she eventually goes crazy because he doesn't love her back.Acting: Except for Adjani's performance, the acting is not very good, but that doesn't matter too much because the only person with a large role is Adjani. The guy who plays Pinson is pretty one dimensional. Anyway though, Adjani gives an Oscar-worthy performance, and balances her character's vigorously muscular and blunt aggression with her character's silky-fine desperation and entrapment. Another actress might have played Adele as being recklessly obsessed, but Adjani doesn't do that. Adjani actually shows us the thoughts and rationality of her character; we first see Adele as an intelligent, innocent young woman who somehow, some way, becomes slimmed down to a stub of passion in Pinson's presence. Cinematography: bland and bleak, which works in a way because that's how Adele views the world in comparison to her own out-of-proportion sadness, but also doesn't work because that's all it does: show us how the world looks like to Adele. I would have preferred if the cinematography actually captured the different emotions Adele was going through in each scene, it would have made the cinematography less one-note. This flaw in the cinematography unfortunately carries over to the overall tone of the film. Script: Good. It definitely conveys how Adele is always trying, with a passion so great it verges on the comical, to form the confusion of her life into a solid piece of truth. Part of this passion seems to be part of her neuroses; part of it seems to be the artist in her at work.The one flaw in the script was the voice over at the end: it didn't really give you a good idea of the rest of Adele's life, and I bet the writer put it in there because he thought, " Whoa, this script is pretty long. I'd better gloss over the later years of Adele's life." Costume design: Adele's red dress seems appropriately color-coded with the cinematography of the film, which, as I stated above, isn't such a good thing. Nothing else besides that red dress stuck out at me, and the rest of the costume design was pretty mediocre. Camera-work: Very good. I particularly like the slow zoom-in on the picture of Pinson, it was very powerful. Another good camera-work choice was when Pinson realized that Adele had told her father that she and Pinson were getting married. The director filmed this scene with the door blocking half the screen, which made the viewer feel, like Adele, very cut off from Pinson. I really liked the camera-work here, actually. Music: Powerful and fitting. I particularly liked the music when Pinson was walking towards Adele at the end. Overall: Very good film mainly carried by Adjani's excellent performance.