A profoundly beautiful movie (The New York Times), The Story of Adele H. is a haunting film based on a true story about desire, devotion…and madness. Oscar-nominated* Isabelle Adjani stars in this lush portrait of a woman whose obsessive passion sets the stage for one of the most romantic films of recent years (Saturday Review). Adele, daughter of French author and patriot Victor Hugo, is beautiful, composed and filled with the same brilliant writing talent as her famous father. However, Adele is driven not by literary aspirations but by love. Impelled by a need that will not be denied, she has run away from home to follow her handsome, lieutenant, womanizing lover (Bruce Robinson) across an ocean to wintry Halifax, Nova Scotia. Wild with desire, she’ll risk everything to renew their brief affair. And if she can’t win him back, there’ll be a terrible price to pay.
Adele H. then, must have seemed the ideal Truffaut heroine when he happened across her diaries. And he has made one of his best films about her. He stars Isabelle Adjani, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, severely beautiful young woman, and then photographs her slowly losing all notion of reality. Truffaut’s colors are blacks and browns and blues, and he fills the screen with shadows; this is the film of a life into which little happiness found its way. And yet Truffaut finds a certain nobility in Adele. He quotes one of the passages in her diaries twice: She writes that she will walk across the ocean to be with her lover. He sees this, not as a declaration of love, but as a statement of a single-mindedness so total that a kind of grandeur creeps into it. – Roger Ebert
Starring Isabelle Adjani, Bruce Robinson, Joseph Blatchley, Ivry Gitlis, Sylvia Marriott.
Note: Set in Halifax in 1863 and directed by Francois Truffaut. Willow and Thatch has seen this and doesn’t consider it to be romantic as much as a recount of a true, intense, sad and somewhat dark story of unrequited love and obsession. The cinematography by Nestor Almendros is exquisite and the style of the film, with narration (she kept extensive journals), is engaging.
In French and English, with subtitles in English.