1863. The celebrated French writer Victor Hugo, opposed to Napoleon III’s seizure of power in France, has been living in exile on Guernsey. There, his youngest child Adèle (Isabelle Adjani) had a brief affair with British army lieutenant Pinson (Bruce Robinson). She follows him to Halifax, Nova Scotia, an English army outpost during the American Civil War. She is still in love with Pinson, but he sees her as having been just another conquest and is no longer interested in her. Alone and incognito (calling herself Miss Lewly) in a foreign country, Adèle’s desperation increases.

The Story of Adèle H. (L’histoire d’Adèle H.) is based on a true story and establishes its bona fides at the start with a narrator filling us in with the historical background with the aid of a map and a painting. The narrator returns at the end, with his voiceover supported by drawings and still photographs of the real Adèle and her gravestone. In between we have a story of unrequited love which undoes its heroine, and it’s dominated by the performance of Isabelle Adjani.

This sounds like the stuff of a romantic melodrama (like, say, Letter from an Unknown Woman, the great film on not dissimilar subject matter), and in its way it is, but François Truffaut (from a script by himself, Jean Gruault and Suzanne Schiffman) tells the story with some detachment. So we have a tale of overwhelming blind infatuation kept at a distance. There’s something of an arm’s-length feel to this film, despite the careful craftsmanship. Adèle isn’t always a sympathetic character, deceiving her parents about a non-existent marriage to Pinson and later trying to attract him by pretending to be pregnant. You could imagine an unsympathetic version of this film from Pinson’s perspective painting Adèle as an increasingly unhinged stalker. She is certainly prone to reinventing herself: at one point she calls herself Léopoldine, which was the name of her dead older sister. However, it’s due to Adjani’s full-throttle performance that she retains as much of our sympathy as she does. Pinson is an admittedly handsome blank by comparison, no doubt intentionally so. He’s there for Adèle to project her longings on to, in the face of his indifference. Just another conquest. There will be others.

Isabelle Adjani was nineteen at the time of production, although Adèle was actually thirty-three at the point where the film starts and she arrives in Nova Scotia. Truffaut obtained the rights to the story from Victor Hugo’s descendants, and permission was granted on condition that Hugo did not himself appear, though there is some voiceover when his daughter receives letters from him. Although Catherine Deneuve had once been considered for the lead role, Truffaut decided he wanted a newcomer to play her. He did consider Stacey Tendeter, who had played Muriel in his previous film Anne and Muriel (Les deux anglaises et le continent, 1971, aka Two English Girls), but settled on Adjani after seeing her in the 1974 film The Slap (La gifle, 1974). The film was all shot on Guernsey apart from the later sequence set in Barbados. This was shot on Île de Gorée, two kilometres from the harbour of Dakar, Senegal, of which it is a district. Due to the cast being bilingual, the film was filmed in both French and English (more of which, see below), with the French takes shot first and the English second. (The English translation is credited to Jan Dawson, the film critic who had previously been the editor of the Monthly Film Bulletin.) Truffaut gives himself a brief cameo as a soldier Adèle mistakes for Pinson.

Another major contributor was cinematographer Nestor Almendros, in his third of what would be nine feature films he shot for Truffaut. Almendros shared with Truffaut (and his other significant longtime creative partner, Eric Rohmer) a taste for simplifying the image. While he was not above visual stylisation, Almendros in his major work – including Days of Heaven, for which he won his Oscar – found beauty in natural light, or if that was not possible light sources which could be justified. His cinematography is mostly intentionally subdued, with many browns and blacks and occasional bursts of bright colour, such as the red of the soldiers’ uniforms. This was Almendros’s first film using a new stock (Kodak 5247), which had a finer grain and a wider colour range than earlier stocks. This enabled him to go further in shooting scenes in semi-darkness than he had been able to in earlier films, such as in Anne and Muriel. Almendros and production designer Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko set a dominant colour tone for particular scenes: those in the Halifax bank are dominated by browns, honeys and earth tones, Adèle’s room dark blues. Lighting used oil lamps, augmented by a small amount of electric light. The later Barbadian scenes are notably brighter and sunbaked, in contrast to Adèle’s increasingly mentally and physically dishevelled state at this point in the film. Almendros preferred the English version of the film from the point of view of his work, as by the time the English-dialogue scenes were shot, the camera movements had been perfected. He also credited the film with establishing his reputation in the USA.

The Story of Adèle H. was a moderate success at the box office: it’s necessary to remember that for all of their international esteem, none of the French New Wave had a sizeable hit at their local box office until Truffaut did with The Last Metro. However, it had largely strong notices and attracted awards attention. At the first César ceremony in 1976, the film was nominated in three categories: Truffaut for his direction, Adjani as Best Actress and Kohut-Svelko for his production design. Adjani won several awards for her performance, including those from the National Board of Review, the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics’ Circle, the last name also awarding the film Best Screenplay. Adjani was also nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress, making her at the time the youngest-ever nominee, though she has since been surpassed by Keisha Castle-Hughes, Jennifer Lawrence and Quvenzhané Wallis (for Whale Rider, Winter’s Bone and Beasts of the Southern Wild respectively).

The Story of Adèle H. is released by Radiance on a Region B Blu-ray. The film had an A certificate for its UK cinema release in 1977. For DVD release in 2003 (the first time I saw the film) it was upped to 12 and it retains that rating on this disc.

The film was shot in 35mm colour and the Blu-ray transfer is presented in the intended aspect ratio of 1.66:1. The often darkly-lit colour scheme comes over very well, and grain is natural and filmlike. The Barbadian scenes are intentionally brighter by contrast.

The soundtrack is the original mono, rendered as LPCM 2.0. As mentioned above, the film was shot in two versions, French and English. The English version was the one released in UK cinemas, but the previous DVD and this Blu-ray have the French, which does still have several sequences in English. There’s nothing untoward about the sound mix, with dialogue, music and sound effects clear and well-balanced. The English subtitles are optional, but it should be said that they aren’t hard-of-hearing subtitles: they don’t translate the English dialogue nor any music or sound effects. The subtitles are optional on all the French-language extras, which is all of them except Phuong Le’s appreciation where the film extracts are mute with Le’s voiceover. One nitpick regarding those on the feature: Victor Hugo is described as an “écrivain”, which the subtitles translate as “poet” instead of “writer”.

Appreciation by Phuong Le (17:00)
Recorded for this release, critic Phuong Le begins by commenting on the French poster design, with a haunted Adèle facing us but with Pinson by her side facing away, so he is something of a void. Le continues with a brief overview of the actual Adèle’s life, at a time when a woman’s life, particularly one of an upper-class background, was constrained by a literal patriarchy, namely the will of her father. Adèle had artistic ambitions in music and writing which were not taken seriously and were thwarted, something the film doesn’t do more than hint at. Victor Hugo was a controlling father, sometimes censoring what she read, and her brother Charles told her that the only way she had to escape was via marriage. Le emphasises Truffaut’s constantly “jittery” moving camera, as if it was trying to keep up with its protagonist, and her many false identities during the film. She also emphasises that we see more of Adèle’s gaze than that of other characters’ and Truffaut’s use of frames within the frame. Le makes a couple of slips: she gives the name of the island where Victor Hugo was in exile as Jersey rather than Guernsey, and when she mentions Truffaut emphasising Adèle’s isolation by having her the only woman on the boat which takes her to Halifax, the clip from the film itself shows another woman sitting two away from her.

Interview with Nestor Almendros (30:01)
Recorded in 1986, this interview is more of a career overview than specific to The Story of Adèle H. though that is the only film we see extracts from as others are represented by stills. Almendros’s native language was Spanish, but here he talks to camera in French. As with his invaluable book A Man with a Camera (on which I have drawn for this and other reviews), this interview is more about film technique and his aesthetic sensibilities and principles than anything very personal, until near the end.

This interview has an emphasis on Almendros’s collaboration with Truffaut, more so than on his other major collaboration, with Eric Rohmer (seven features and three shorts). In fact it was because of Rohmer that Almendros met Truffaut, as the latter had seen Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s (Ma nuit chez Maud, 1969), which is in black and white. Truffaut was looking at someone to shoot The Wild Child (L’enfant sauvage, 1970) in black and white and assumed that Almen  dros was experienced with it, though Maud had been just Almendros’s fourth feature as a cinematographer and the only one to date which had been in monochrome. Truffaut preferred to communicate by means of letters and notes and disliked using the telephone – you wonder how he would deal with social media and smartphones if he were here today.

Almendros compares the styles of Rohmer and Truffaut. While both shared his taste for simplicity and natural or justified light, Rohmer preferred a static camera while Truffaut frequently moved his.
Almendros locates The Story of Adèle H. as the middle panel of what he calls Truffaut’s “calligraphic trilogy”, three period/historical literary adaptations, two of them centring on women, all of which Almendros shot. It was preceded by Anne and Muriel, based on the other novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, whose Jules et Jim Truffaut had previously adapted. It was followed by The Green Room (La chambre verte, 1978), based on a Henry James story.

Finally, Almendros is moving when he talks about Truffaut’s illness and death, at the age of just fifty-two, from a brain tumour. Nestor Almendros died in 1992 at the age of sixty-two. This featurette is dedicated to both their memories.

Interview with François Truffaut (2:21)
A brief extract from a television (France’s TF1) interview from 1975. Truffaut says that The Story of Adèle H. was not a film which originated with a particular actor, such as Jean-Pierre Léaud or Jeanne Moreau, so he had to find his Adèle. He was looking for someone who wasn’t famous, and she had to be bilingual due to the dialogue in both French and English. He found her in The Slap, represented here by stills – a comedy but he saw it, and her performance, as having the intensity of drama. She also had some scenes with English dialogue. Truffaut thinks that she carried that intensity over to his film.

Interview with Isabelle Adjani (5:16)
Also from TF1 in 1975, this is a rather oddly-staged interview where Adjani and André Halimi seemingly meet in some woodlands and she leans against a tree while they talk. Asked whether she prefers dramatic roles like Adèle or lighter ones like hers in The Slap, she says she prefers the variety, though it depends on the director and the film’s purpose. After a long sequence of stills from the film, backed by music, Halimi asks her what young girls today (i.e. in 1975) would make of her character, and would they think that love is as absolute as Adèle did, more than a century earlier? This is a question she finds hard to answer, but she hopes they enjoy the film for its romance – and the director cuts to a close shot of her rubbing one foot against the back of her other leg. The interview ends with extracts from the film which are very washed out, showing up the difference of film telecined into television video (SECAM presumably) from nearly fifty years ago to Blu-ray resolution today. As with the stills montage, this tends to pad out this interview. After this, Halimi and Adjani walk away from the camera, their assignment in the woods at an end.

Lyon premiere footage (2:56)
This begins with our interviewer (uncredited) talking to camera about how some films are more challenging to an audience. He drops the name of the then-current The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Hester Street though presumably we are meant to see Truffaut’s film in the same light. There is relatively little specifically about Truffaut’s film in this item, though he and Isabelle Adjani are shown round an exhibition of old cinema and pre-cinema moving picture technology. Then, halfway through, our interviewer does sit down with Truffaut to talk about “a wonderful love story, an impossible love story”. For Truffaut, it’s a film based around a woman’s face. Adjani meanwhile doesn’t think the role fitted her like a glove, and wonders if roles ever do as there is always work to be done.

Trailer (2:50)
For a while you have to wonder if this trailer intends to play down the fact that this is a French film. There are the English actors like Bruce Robinson (who might have been known for Romeo and Juliet seven years earlier) and there is no dialogue until halfway through so as not to deter potential audiences who might be put off by subtitles. But this is very much a tradition-of-quality arthouse trailer, only without any critics’ quotes.

Booklet
Released with this limited edition, this contains archival writing on the film but was not available for review.

Maybe not Truffaut’s greatest work (of the “calligraphic trilogy” I’d rate Anne and Muriel higher), but still a considerable part of his filmography, The Story of Adèle H. showcases an Oscar-nominated performance from Isabelle Adjani, which set her up for a considerable subsequent career. Including the separate English version, for historical interest at least, would have been good, but otherwise this does present the film well, and other than seeing the film in a good 35mm print, Blu-ray enables us to appreciate the work of one of the finest cinematographers there was.