Fais-moi de ton mieux: L'Histoire d'Adèle H.

The "Best" Shot

The Film Experience has recommenced its third season of Hit Me With Your Best Shot.  This week it's François Truffaut's L'Histoire d'Adèle H. or The Story of Adele H.  I imagine Nat chose it for thematic reasons which I won't divulge to those unfamiliar with the plot, as I was.  Let's just say Father "H" is a big deal and everything that happened is true.  Internationally renown French actress Isabelle Adjani played the title role, which led to her first of two deserved Oscar nominations (the second would arrive fourteen years later for Camille Claudel).  France produces a major actress every decade like clockwork and Adjani would be its spokeswoman for (being born in) the 1950s (perhaps the decade by decade rundown would make a fun future post).  


Her Adèle is a petulant young woman obsessed with British Lieutenant Albert Pinson (the looker Bruce Robinson, whose heavenly face may live on in Chace Crawford, would eventually be nominated for writing the screenplay for The Killing Fields; he'd subsequently screen-write and direct Withnail & I, Jennifer 8, and The Rum Diary, as well as write In Dreams).  She crosses the Atlantic during the 1860s to Halifax, lying to family and friends, as she holes herself up in her rented room, conniving via correspondence both abroad and locally to land her man.  Unlike the last HMWYBS lead actress Joan Crawford in Possessed, Adjani has youth, as well as a soft milky white beauty.  She also has time (and her father's money) on her side, which makes it easier to digest her stalking.  And she is relentless in her creative ways of pulling Pinson into her life.  There isn't ANYTHING this bitch wouldn't do to get her man and, boy, does she exhaust the possibilities, even resorts to the oldest trick in the book.  She's not only running towards a man she wants to lose herself in who wants nothing to do with her, but she's running away from an identity that is both a blessing and a curse.  She seeks anonymity from familial stock that enables her to indulge her fancy.  The girl had got a disease and Adjani sells her affliction to the audience in one incredible performance.  Adèle momentarily finds respite in the kindest of a stranger who can see right into her heart and nurse her back to physical health, while observing that her soul may be irreparable.  This is a tragedy of sorts, but not in the ways one might expect.  Additionally, Truffaut makes her antics easier to stomach with a nod here and a wink there to the audience, like puppies emerging out of nowhere trailing behind Pinson and his lover ascending a stairwell, as Adele spies on them from outside.  Not so funny (or sexy) is Robinson actually kicking one of them, sending them cascading down.  And there is some beautiful irony, when Adele, of an age that is the summer of one's youth, describes her life as autumnal, only to have it snow in the next frame.   Things end with a nifty little history lesson.  

Alex Forrest never got to this point;
she probably has never been to Barbados either

Adjani's Steely Soft French Beauty

"... You deserve all the women on earth." 
(But, not when you kick puppies down stairs)

Previous HMWYBS:
Picnic
The Story of Adele H.

Possessed

Edward Scissorhands

The Exorcist

Pariah
Raise the Red Lantern

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

The Circus