Sara Batkie
Six years before Isabelle Adjani descended into the Berlin subway and birthed a thousand memes, she made an indelible impression as another woman on the brink of madness. While her work in 1975’s The Story of Adèle H. doesn’t require quite the same physical abandon and emotional pyrotechnics as what she accomplishes in Possession, it’s no less a feat of screen acting, especially considering how early on Adjani was in her career. At age twenty, she became the youngest woman ever nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, a record she would hold for twenty-eight years.
François Truffaut’s film opens with a pair of sentences that could be both claim and salvo: “The story of Adèle H. is true. It’s about events that really happened and people that really existed.” This is accurate, in the sense that it’s based in part on the diaries of Adèle Hugo, renowned author Victor Hugo’s second daughter. The script even includes several direct quotes from their pages. Whether it all transpired as depicted is more debatable. Truffaut was inspired to make it after working on 1970’s The Wild Child, another period piece that features a central performance of elemental power. He had to get the rights from Jean Hugo, a direct descendent of the author who only agreed on the stipulation that Victor never appear onscreen. Whatever Truffaut’s original intent in that regard, this winds up working in the film’s favor. Adèle H. is Adjani’s above all.
Though still a relatively new screen presence at the time, Adjani is expected to do the sort of heavy lifting in Adèle H. more customary from a veteran performer. She’s in almost every scene, but there’s a prickliness to her that keeps Adèle at a remove from both the people she encounters and the audience. Yet there is one exception: Adèle is passionately in love with a British soldier named Albert Pinson (played by Bruce Robinson, perhaps best known for writing and directing the semi-autobiographical Withnail & I) who no longer returns her affections. Despite this, Adèle has followed his regiment from the remote island of Guernsey, where her father has been living in exile, to Halifax, traveling under a pseudonym so as not to attract attention.
The year is 1863; it’s a difficult time to be a woman alone. But Adèle is willfully intent on claiming what’s hers, ignoring pleas from her father to return while demanding he send more of her allowance, along with his consent to her marriage to Pinson. Hugo complies but the object of her desire is less interested in her advances. A ne’er do well saddled with gambling debts, Pinson gladly takes her money after he’s already had her body. But his callous rejection of her as a wife precipitates a plunge into insanity that was likely underway long before she arrived in Nova Scotia.
“I have the religion of love,” Adèle declares, and Truffaut and Adjani work in tandem to bring this fanaticism to life. It’s clear from the little she shares with her kindly landlady Mrs. Saunders (Sylvia Marriott) that she’s lived a harrowing existence. Her elder sister Leopoldine drowned at age nineteen, and Adèle’s sleep is troubled by dreams of a roiling sea dragging her to its depths. She’s also a compulsive writer, buying reams of paper from a local bookshop that she fills with inky scrawls. As is only appropriate for the offspring of a famous poet, words seem to hold a transformative capacity for Adèle. In Truffaut’s realization, composing a letter becomes a kind of performance with Adjani delivering stream of conscious monologues directly to the camera. Her eyes become the focal point in these moments. They can roil as much as the sea that haunts her but they’re often more terrifying when they’re still, seeking out something that lies just beyond the frame.
Ultimately, Adèle is only too aware of her unusualness in society in a way that ends up feeling both self-aggrandizing and tragic. She has no qualms about lying to her family in order to maintain their patronage, but she is also vulnerable to illness and starvation when those funds are late or withheld. She is also adept at revising her story when it suits her; after Pinson refuses her, she tells Mrs. Saunders that marriage is degrading to a woman like her. “I could never give up the name Miss Hugo,” she asserts. But there are only so many things a woman like her is allowed to be. By the end, she’s followed the lieutenant to Barbados, wandering the streets in a tattered dress and not recognizing her beloved’s face when she passes him.
Such rapturousness requires a performance to match, and Adjani more than manages it. When asked about directing her, Truffaut said, “It’s daily suffering for me, and almost an agony for her. For her profession is her religion,” echoing Adèle’s own conception of love. Critics responded – Pauline Kael wrote in When the Lights Go Down of the film having a “tidal pull” and Roger Ebert sensed a “certain nobility” in Adèle’s fervor. Adjani’s willingness to take her craft to such extremes would become a trademark of her career, sometimes infamously. Among actresses of her generation, Adjani stands as alone as her heroine.
“The Story of Adèle H.” is streaming on Tubi and MGM+.
