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Rating: Who is Adele H. and why does she intend to remain anonymous? What is so uncomfortable about the letters that follow that silent consonant, which in this case couldn't be more silent? After all, it's just three little letters, u - g - o. Hugo. And so we move on to the next question. What benefit is there in hiding being the fifth child of the greatest exponent of French Romanticism, indeed, of more, one of the greatest authors of all time? As with so many other questions, a few lines aren't enough to explain it, perhaps not even rivers of ink. It needs a movie.
It is 1843, and the Hugo family is on the island of Guernsey, a short distance from Normandy but under the dominion of the English crown, when they are struck by a grave tragedy, the drowning at just nineteen years old of Leopoldine, Victor's second daughter and a tenacious follower in her father's footsteps. Particularly affected is the youngest of the family, Adele. She is a fragile, romantic girl, easily impressionable, the ideal prey for a playboy such as Lieutenant Pinson (Bruce Robinson, "Romeo and Juliet" - Zeffirelli), an English officer. It might be the usual story of the "seduced & abandoned," but the girl in question is no ordinary one. Adele is fragile but not weak, romantic but not vain, impressionable but not foolish. Her passion leads her to secretly follow Pinson to Halifax, in Nova Scotia, where Adele uses the pseudonym Miss Lewly. She prefers not to be discovered, does not want to cause a stir.
The girl tries in vain to persuade the officer to marry her but he rejects all her attempts. Adele spies on him, follows him, leaves him love notes and above all writes, tirelessly. Letters to her father, who tries to convince her to return home, keeps a tormenting diary. Suddenly money begins to run out and Adele, to obtain more and to end the family's continuous requests for her return, tells them of her marriage to Pinson, obviously fabricated. The news reaches Guernsey, spreads to Halifax, and reaches the barracks. Ruinously discovered, Adele leaves Halifax. She can no longer distinguish reality from lies, she is now insane and follows her beloved to Barbados, his new destination, where she assumes the name Mrs. Pinson. She wanders the streets in tattered clothes, dazed and expressionless. Ultimately helped by a local, she will be put back on her way home. Her father will opt for an asylum, where Adele will remain until the day of her death.
Adele Hugo's diaries were found in 1955. Most were interested because of the surname, but not Truffaut who made it the subject of his fourteenth feature film. The French director declared that little to none of the entire story was fictionalized, which must therefore be considered as real. The role of Adele was entrusted to Isabelle Adjani who, it seems, was even the inspiration for the work. With this film, the aim that the director declared he had set for himself was to restore Adele's historical and poetic dignity that she had never been granted. Indeed, overshadowed even after her death by the figure of Leopoldine, to whom her father dedicated many of his writings, Adele suffered greatly for her family condition. The girl's suffering is described in meticulous detail, revealing a psychological portrait of unusual grandeur.
But Truffaut, to achieve this aim, lies. Adele was thirty-three years old when she fled to follow the officer, not in her twenties, and the letters from Halifax were not sent to her father, but to her brother. Some of these letters were never written by Adele but by Truffaut himself and the diary was written entirely in code. So why change such simple facts? Because Truffaut does not intend to speak about Adele but about her epic nature, about how intense her figure was and above all intends to speak about abandonment. Truffaut reads between the lines of Adele's diary to discover how much anguish can be hidden behind the loss of a sister with whom one has lived in empathy, to probe the relationship with a father who is not like many others. Adele loved her father and felt that she was not reciprocated in the same way. It is to him that Adele feels she must account for what is happening in Halifax and knows she must lie if she does not want to disappoint him. But at the heart of the plot remains the love story.
Isabelle Adjani, ethereal and sensual, penetrating and inaccessible, proves fully capable of leading a "solo" drama and handles with ease the camera pointed solely and always at her, on her beautiful face continuously shattered by extraordinary play of light, teetering between shadow/madness and light/love. Watching Adjani's slender body gradually succumb first to pneumonia and later to suffering from love seems almost a vindication for Adele, demonstrating how senseless certain words can be, even those of a great writer like Hugo, who in "Les Miserables" wrote "The soul helps the body and in certain moments uplifts it. It is the only bird that sustains the cage".
Some have glimpsed in Adele's story a sort of moral debate on the condition of women, on women's emotional freedom, but it all seems mere behind-the-scenes theorization. The protagonist is not women; it is Adele and her desire, more relevant than ever. Truffaut manages to combine in a single screenplay (to which Jean Gruault and Suzanne Schiffman collaborated) the Victorian mentality of the time, prone to scandal, and the illustration of a pain that knows no time nor era, but above all, proves to be a skillful narrator. Never pathetic, never detached, he addresses Adele's drama with heartfelt humanity and with a seriousness too rarely granted to the mad, even when she turns to a hypnotist to learn his art in order to enchant Pinson. He describes with absolute elegance the stages of a love's calvary, yet still a calvary, violent and sublime, like madness.
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