L'histoire d'Adèle H. (1975)

"L'histoire d'Adèle H." is yet another compelling and interesting achievement by french master François Truffaut. Away from his best 60s achievements, but yet ridding high on international fame after his well received and Oscar-winner for best foreign picture in 1973 "La nuit americaine", Truffaut chose another very personal story based on true events and on a diary left behind by the main protagonist (as he had done in "L'Enfant sauvage" in 1970). Adéle Hugo is the daughter of famous french writer Victor Hugo, who follows her former lover Lt Albert Pinson (played by Bruce Robinson, who would become the writer of "The Killing fields" - 1984 - and the director of "Withnail and I", 1987), to Halifax, in Nova Scotia. Madly in love with him, she confronts him there, to find that he has no further interest in her whatsoever. Relentlessly she tries to win back his affections, through money or using schemes such as proclaiming their (inexistent) marriage or pretending to be pregnant. All the while, her letters to her father and her diary, which are read out loud by her for the audience's sake, show her fantasies, her desires, her alternate reality as she wished it to be, but that never comes true. Ultimately, she descends into a spiral of madness, and ends up penniless roaming the streets, lost and insane. The climax comes when she doesn't even recognize Pinson any more. The movie may have the fault of having a very thin story line which is a repetition of the same theme: unrequited love that leads into madness. Yet this allows for a magnificent study of the killing of a soul through desperation and obsession. Truffaut never had an inkling for very dramatic climaxes and his movies often present even tones, but the structure of the picture is great, and the little episodes show a tormented soul, always in the shade of a famous and genious father, who lives for love, for this love, and which goes to increasing desperate measures to gaine it, from the innocent lie, to the convincing herself of another truth, to more depraved states of degradation, all of which slowly construct a personality on the brink of madness, which inevitably comes. Adele is off course played by Isabelle Adjani, in her first movie (Truffaut had spotted her on a TV-film). Her performance is near-perfect and the way she captivates the audience to her plight is masterful. Her love obsession, her descent into the abyss of madness is incredibly portrayed. Her losing the Oscar to Louise Fletcher (on "One flew over the cuckoo's nest") is very debatable indeed. A focused character study which rides almost solely on the performance of Adjani, and the way her "madness" is constructed and displayed, without lifting the movie's tone, nor making any moral judgements, in a supposed attempt of a true account of the diary and letters of Adele H.