The Story of Adele H.

The Story of Adele H. (Truffaut, 1975) is a story of constructs. The question Truffaut poses in the film is how much of what we construct is predetermined.

The film opens with a blank parchment. As the credits role, the parchment is shown filled with sketches of half-realized edifices, roiling surf, and an enlightened woman following a single star in an otherwise dark world. These sketches describe the partial constructs in Adele's (Isabelle Adjani) world and the forces that roil against her. The enlightened woman represents Adele; and the star the ideal she strives for, simultaneously an instrument that lights her way in a dark forbidding world and a source of frustration since it is forever out of her reach no matter how elaborate her schemes to obtain it.

As the credits continue, images of fanciful castles reach into the sky. In one, a castle is washed with white against a depressing black and grey background. The white castle represents both Adele's and her famous father's refuge. For Adele her refuge are the white reams of paper she fills in the turret of her castle (the upstairs room she occupies in Mrs. Saunder's home where she can lock herself up with her writings); for her father the white castle resembles the Hauteville House, his place of residence during his exile.

Clearly, the story of Adele is to contain lofty goals, places of refuge, amd many obstacles. Despite the obstacles, Adele continues to seek her ideal. And it is this pursuit of the ideal that propels Adele through life "from the old world into the new." Her unrelenting pursuit of the ideal, and Truffaut's many hints, forces comparisons to her father's life.

Truffaut also provides some context. The year is 1863, two years into America's civil war. The film closes with the death of Adele in 1915 in the midst of the First World War. These wars provide, on a grand scale, examples of the costs accompanying any unrelenting pursuit of an ideal.

Both wars can also be loosly associated with her father. The civil war is fought to abolish slavery. Madame Baa, a former slave, later describes Adele's father as a friend of the oppressed. The black light Adele's father reports seeing at his death is interpreted by some as foreshadowing the First World War, a war fought to end all wars. That these start and finish Truffaut's film is an indication that the arc of Adele's life is bounded by the arc of her famous father.

Truffaut has set the table for us. The Story of Adele H. is the story of a girl fulfilling the destiny already determined by her father, even as she seeks her own.

Parallels between Adale and her father are many. Adele finds herself between the French world of her past and the English world represented by Lt. Pinson (Bruce Robinson); Adele's father lives on a channel island between located between France and England. Adele has exiled herself in Halifax on the British island of Nove Scotia; her father has exiled himself in Huateville House on the British island of Guernesey. Adele pursues her ideal despite it costing her friends and family; Adele's father pursues his ideals despite it forcing him into exile and having his sons imprisoned. Adele's haughty attitude describes her head-in-the-clouds point of view. Adele's father resides in Hauteville Hause. Both were persecuted for their beliefs. Both exist in the new worlds defined by Halifax and post-Republic France, respectively.

No parallel however, is larger then their skill in creating constructs (her father's works are voluminous; hers require reams of paper.) Dr. Murdock compares her father to Home, Dante, and Shakespeare. Her works are written in a language eventually untranslatable. Their literary constructs have to do with ideals, and would control each of their lives. His works were largely complete. Adele's were just being constructed.

Truffaut provides examples that both show that Adele is continuously working on her construct and the extent to which her construct has taken over her world. An example of the first is the scene where Adele encounters a boy under a table at the bank. The scene starts with Adele outside the bank. As she heads into the bank, she looks at the reflection in the bank's sign as if to check who the person reflected might be. Once inside, the diegetic sounds of a typewriter indicates her story is being written even as we watch. After picking up her letter, she stops at a desk where she notices a boy (representing innocent imagination) playing under the desk. Behind her, an accountant writes in a ledger. When the boy asks Adele what her name is, she tells him it's Leopoldine. Afterwards, she goes back to the boy, who has pen in hand, and informs him that her real name is Adele. The pen at the ready represents the act of recording what was transpiring. The act of first informing the boy that her name was Leopoldine, then Adele was one of trying out different constructs.

A second darker example of this is when Adele is in bed sounding out a potential new point of view to weave into her story - that she was born of an unknown father - only to reject it, not because of any basis in fact, but because it does not align with her earlier construct. Adele has become a prisoner within her own story, no longer in control of her destiny, but rather controlled by the logic of her story; once again, resembling her father. At some point, Adele's father must have realized that his ideas had taken a life of their own, and that he would forever be associated with the as yet unknown derivatives of those ideas; that his ideas would forever influence how his own story evolves after he's gone. So in this sense both of their lives are determined by stories no longer in their control. This goes to the question Truffaut asks: How much do past relationships shape one's ability to influence their own future? In the case of Adele, what we have seen so far is that the path she chooses is almost wholly determined by her father.

Why is Adele pursuing Lt. Pinson? The reason is that he represents an ideal important to her. How is it that Adele can even consider the flawed lieutenant an ideal? Her response to Judge Johnstone provides an answer: "Do you think people can always control their feelings? One can be in love with a man and still despise everything about him." Just as the Judge can disagree with her father's politics, yet admire his courage, so can people marry (Adele claims she is the wife of Lt. Pinson) themselves to an idea and live with its faults. This is necessarily the case for people, on both sides, who fight in wars. For some it is the preservation of a certain order and/or property. For others it is the ideal behind that order and the possesion of property that drives them. If Adele's father did, in fact foreshadow the First World War, he did so only because he knew the latter all too well.

If the arc of Adele's life is predetermined, all she has to do is declare something or someone an ideal and pursue it as such. For Adele, what Lt. Pinson represented was the ideal that once she gave herself to, she would attach her body and soul to it forever. This ability to declare an ideal and pursue it unfailingly at tremendous cost is the legacy that Adele's father left her. Once she declared her ideal (Lt. Pinson) she could no more let it go than her father could turn his back on the oppressed. At the point of declaration, Adele had mounted the arc of her story.

No matter how tenuous the link may have seemed to Adele (Her father's name written in dust on a mirror represents the tenuousness of the link, but also the ubiquitness of the link; and it is Adele we see reflected through the dust. Also the scene in the cemetary symbolizes the grasp the past has on us until the day we die.) it is her relationship with her father that predestines Adele. Like her father before her, she is incapable of not declaring and pursuing her ideals. It is all she knows. Her story was written by her father before she even put pen to paper, but it is still her story to live. Her strength is that the tragedy of her illness did not prevent her from fulfilling her destiny.