Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut\u2019s film opens with a pair of sentences that could be both claim and salvo: \u201cThe story of Ad\u00e8le H. is true. It\u2019s about events that really happened and people that really existed.\u201d This is accurate, in the sense that it\u2019s based in part on the diaries of Ad\u00e8le Hugo, renowned author Victor Hugo\u2019s 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\u2019s The Wild Child<\/em>, 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\u2019s original intent in that regard, this winds up working in the film\u2019s favor. Ad\u00e8le H. <\/em>is Adjani\u2019s above all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though still a relatively new screen presence at the time, Adjani is expected to do the sort of heavy lifting in Ad\u00e8le H. <\/em>more customary from a veteran performer. <\/em>She\u2019s in almost every scene, but there\u2019s a prickliness to her that keeps Ad\u00e8le at a remove from both the people she encounters and the audience. Yet there is one exception: Ad\u00e8le 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<\/em><\/a>) who no longer returns her affections. Despite this, Ad\u00e8le 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The year is 1863; it\u2019s a difficult time to be a woman alone. But Ad\u00e8le is willfully intent on claiming what\u2019s 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\u2019er do well saddled with gambling debts, Pinson gladly takes her money after he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI have the religion of love,\u201d Ad\u00e8le declares, and Truffaut and Adjani work in tandem to bring this fanaticism to life. It\u2019s clear from the little she shares with her kindly landlady Mrs. Saunders (Sylvia Marriott) that she\u2019s lived a harrowing existence. Her elder sister Leopoldine drowned at age nineteen, and Ad\u00e8le\u2019s sleep is troubled by dreams of a roiling sea dragging her to its depths. She\u2019s 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 Ad\u00e8le. In Truffaut\u2019s 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\u2019re often more terrifying when they\u2019re still, seeking out something that lies just beyond the frame. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ultimately, Ad\u00e8le 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. \u201cI could never give up the name Miss Hugo,\u201d she asserts. But there are only so many things a woman like her is allowed to be. By the end, she\u2019s followed the lieutenant to Barbados, wandering the streets in a tattered dress and not recognizing her beloved\u2019s face when she passes him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such rapturousness requires a performance to match, and Adjani more than manages it. When asked about directing her, Truffaut said<\/a>, \u201cIt’s daily suffering for me, and almost an agony for her. For her profession is her religion,\u201d echoing Ad\u00e8le\u2019s own conception of love. Critics responded \u2013 Pauline Kael wrote in When the Lights Go Down<\/em> of the film having a \u201ctidal pull\u201d and Roger Ebert sensed<\/a> a \u201ccertain nobility\u201d in Ad\u00e8le\u2019s fervor. Adjani\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The Story of Ad\u00e8le H.<\/i>” is streaming on Tubi<\/a> and MGM+<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/adele-still-1024x614.jpg\")
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