421 - The Story of Adele H., France, 1975. Dir. Francois Truffaut.

Sunday, February 25, 2018

421 - The Story of Adele H., France, 1975.  Dir. Francois Truffaut.

"This incredible thing, that a young girl should step over the ocean, leave the old world for the new world, to join her lover--this thing will I accomplish."

So says Adele H.  And she means it.

Halifax.  Formerly French Acadia.  Nova Scotia.  Canada.

The people are worried.  There may be Yankee spies among them.  They are smuggling goods.

It is 1863.  The United States of America is attacking the Confederate States of America.

Great Britain has stationed troops in Halifax.  The British authorities are checking Europeans who disembark at port.  Checking their papers.

The Great Eastern.  A huge steamship.  The Floating City.

A woman gets off with the crowd.  She rides the rowboat.  She comes ashore.  A man from Liverpool is stopped.  Questioned.  Harassed.  She avoids that drama.  Walks around.  Follows a group another way.

Mr. O'Brien, a cab driver, horse and carriage, takes her to the Hotel Hampstead.  She looks at the Hotel.  She says No.  He takes her to the Boarding House.  What we would call Bed & Breakfast.  They call Room and Board.  Mrs. Saunders takes her in.

Our woman identifies herself as Miss Lewly.

The next day she goes to the Notary Public.  A. Lenoir.  She introduces herself as Mrs. Lenormand, married to Dr. Lenormand, a doctor in Paris.

The names, they keep a-changin'.

Mr. Lenoir asks how he may help.

She says she has a niece.  The way someone might say, "I have a friend."  Meaning herself.  Her "niece" is romantic.  Her "niece" is in love with Lieutenant Pinson of the 16th Hussars.

Whether or not you know what Hussars are (they are cavalrymen, the term originating in Hungary), you will know who Lieutenant Pinson is.  Adele H. will be sure of it.

Adele H. is her real name.  As the title has already told us.  We will learn that Adele H. is Adele Hugo.  Daughter of Victor Hugo.  The great French writer.

You may have heard of him.  He wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame (or Notre Dame de Paris) (1831).  And Les Miserables (1862).  Among many other works.  In fact, while we may know him as a novelist, he was known in his lifetime as France's greatest living poet.  He is among the greatest writers in the history of French literature.

Which means his daughter Adele lives under his great shadow.

We will learn that she also lives under the shadow of her older sister.  Leopoldine Hugo.

Leopoldine got married at age 19.  And drowned.  Her new husband jumped in after her.  And drowned.  They were buried together in the same casket.  Leopoldine's dress is on display in the Hugo house.  All of this haunts Adele.  It affects her greatly.  She is overwhelmed by the romantic image of the two together.  She feels jealous of the attention paid to Leopoldine's dress.  She has dreams of her drowning.  Haunting dreams.  Nightmares.

Adele seeks her own romantic story.  She dedicates her life to it.

Adele's story--or Lewly's, or Mrs. Lenormand's--to the Notary is that her "niece" was about to marry Lieutenant Pinson when he was shipped off to Halifax with his regiment.  She has been sent by her family to find him.

The Notary, who is listening to her through an ear trumpet, understands that she wants him to look for Lieutenant Pinson for her.

She repeats that it is for her "niece," as "Lieutenant Pinson is of no interest to me."  She repeats the assertion.  "Lieutenant Pinson is of no interest to me.  All I want is my niece's happiness."

Right.

Adele's story is about how Lieutenant Pinson is of ultimate interest to her.  He is her everything.  The object of her desire.  Her obsession.

She has travelled across the world on her own in order to find him.

Have you read William Faulkner's novel Light in August (1932)?  Remember how the young pregnant Lena Grove crawls out of her bedroom window at night--as if the house itself were pregnant and giving birth to her--and she goes hitchhiking from Doane's Mill, Alabama, to Jefferson, Mississippi, to find the father of her unborn child, Lucas Birch, now known as Joe Brown.

After all, he got her pregnant.  He said he was going to find work for the new family.  He said when he did he would send for her.  Why should she not believe him?

Remember what Martha Armstid says when her husband picks up the hitchhiking Lena and lets her stay the night at their house?  Mrs. Armstid gives Lena her egg money and rages, "You men. . . . You durn men."

Like Lena Grove, Adele Hugo travels the world to find her man, Lieutenant Pinson.  Because at one time he said he wanted to marry her.  But her family refused.  But unlike Lena Grove, Adele Hugo is not pregnant nor does she base her pursuit on an empty promise.  On the contrary, he is quite honest with her.  He knew women before her.  He will know women after her.  He no longer wishes to marry her.  Now go away and leave me alone.

But why should she let that stop her?

She can love him just as much whether he participates in the relationship or not.

And she will prove it.

Her desire develops until it seems to be no longer about him but about the desire itself.  She lives with a single-minded devotion to her romantic ideal.  And she will pay any price to achieve it.

The Notary says Yes.  He will look for Lieutenant Pinson for her.  Discreetly.

(Remember in yesterday's film, Mississippi Mermaid, Francois Truffaut has Louis Mahe and Berthe Roussel hire a private investigator, Comolli, to search for the missing Julie.  These are movies about people looking for people.  And hiring people to help them.)

Mississippi Mermaid
http://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2018/02/420-mississippi-mermaid-france-1969-dir.html

In the very next scene Adele goes to the Book Shop, a paradise, and Lieutenant Pinson is leaving, with another woman and her dog in tow.  The bookseller confirms that it was he.  She states, this time, that Pinson is her sister's brother-in-law.  Maybe we will get the facts straight eventually.

Adele is not here to buy books but to buy paper, and not in sheets but in reams.  She has a lot of writing to do.  She is the daughter of one of the world's great writers, and she herself is a prolific writer.

She secludes herself in the Bed and Board and writes in her journal.  In her own invented language.  One that will need to be interpreted years later.  And she writes letters back and forth to her father in Guernsey.

Throughout their time in Halifax, Adele spies on Pinson.  She arrives at his regiment.  Attends his soirees dressed as a man.  And looks in on his bedroom.

If you are writing a paper or journal article on the voyeuristic nature of film, check out this scene where Lieutenant Pinson brings a woman into his bedroom as Adele stands outside and watches.

Truffaut films it with outdoor wooden walls.  With layers of planes behind which she may hide and through which she may look.

And here we discern the subtlety of Isabelle Adjani's performance.  And why, at age 19, she was nominated for an Oscar and for a Cesar.  And won a Donatello and the NRB and the NSFC and NYFCC.  She watches with layers of emotion.  We expect jealousy, hurt.  She gives us other things that we do not expect.  And she concludes with the slightest of smiles.  A kind of acceptance.  Even approval.

And Nestor Almandros, whom we have seen lensing several of Francois Truffaut's films, as well as co-lensing Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), places the catch light directly into the center of her eyes.  Not on the iris but on the pupil.  Making her already haunted bug eyes look possessed.  And in one of those close-ups a tear begins to form in the center of her lower-right eyelid.  It builds.  And bulges.  Until finally the teardrop shoots down the center of her right cheek.  With her eyes unblinking and that catch light smack in the center of both pupils the whole time.  Her acting.  His lighting.  Genius.

And that is only the technical aspect of that moment.  What is really going on inside of her is going on inside of her heart.  And she is acting with her heart.  The tear is just the overflow.

Days of Heaven
http://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/02/039-days-of-heaven-1978-united-states.html

Bed & Board
http://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/05/125-bed-and-board-1970-france-dir.html

Love On the Run
http://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/05/127-love-on-run-1979-france-dir.html

She will love this man no matter what he does, and she will adapt herself to his behavior, as if participating in it herself, consenting with her blessing as a gesture of love.

When she comes to him in a meadow, she makes her appeal.  If you marry me, you may have all the women you want.  It will be my gift to you.

He is perplexed.  She claims she loves him.  He says she is selfish.  She only cares about her own feelings.  If you love someone, you do not try to manipulate him.  If you love someone, you do not blackmail him.  If you love someone, you set him free.

How does she respond?

She hires a prostitute and sends her to his house with a note, stating that this is her gift to him.

Adele is in this for life.  Despite the fact that another man has proposed to her and she has turned him down.  And the bookseller clearly has a crush on her and would be good to her if she let him.

Her parents love her.  Men love her.  She could live a great life if she could move on.

She writes to her parents requesting their approval for her marriage.  They give it.

She writes them stating that they are now married.  Back in Guernsey Victor Hugo places an announcement in the paper.  When Victor Hugo places an announcement in the paper, it travels around the world.

Back in Halifax they see the announcement.  Lieutenant Pinson gets in trouble with his Commanding Officer to the threat of court-marshal.  He insists he has nothing to do with the announcement, that it must be some sort of a joke, and that he is absolutely not married.

He will not be able to shake her so easily.

He will get engaged and she will do what she can to stop it.  And when his Regiment is shipped to Barbados, well, you may guess where Adele H. ends up going.

Francois Truffaut has made a serious film.  A film about the human heart, the heart of a woman, the capacities and excesses of desire.  And he has filmed it objectively.  As an honest study of real human behavior.  Molly Haskell in her review of 1975, the year the film came out, stated that the film appealed to the intelligence rather than to emotions.  And she loved it.

We never see Victor Hugo in the film but we sense his love for Adele through his letters.

We see the maternal love of a local Barbados woman who sees Adele's plight and makes arrangements to get her home and to get her cared for.

What makes this film all the more compelling is that the story of Adele H. is true.  Adele Hugo really did pursue Lieutenant Pinson for life.  And she really did write about it in reams of journal entries written in her own secret language.  Which had to be translated.

On one level, her life appears sad.  On another, her unrelenting devotion to a single-minded purpose is one for the ages.  Objectively, we see her going into decline.  But subjectively, she might not realize it.  She has her love to keep her warm.

And to give her a lifetime of hope.