Francois Truffaut's historical tale about Victor Hugo's daughter Adele and her obsessive quest for the English soldier she loved is bittersweet and heartfelt at the same time. It takes the true talent and caliber of a director like Truffaut to make a character such as Adele Hugo into a person that ends up being more sympathetic than deplorable. Still, Truffaut does not shy away from the elements that make up her descent into madness and deep sorrow, showing the ways in which she will go to extreme lengths to get what she wants. There is a burning desire in this woman that is both disturbing and admirable at the same time.Isabelle Adjani won much acclaim for her work as Adele and it was well- deserved. At a mere 19, Adjani showed incredible poise as a young actress, capable of carrying virtually the entire picture mostly with her eyes, which are a deep blue and give her face a hauntingly beautiful quality. There is the constant feeling about Adele that she, being the daughter of the famous French poet Victor Hugo, is simply a spoiled rich girl using her father's money to try and buy a husband. Yet, Truffaut does not see it that way. Rather, he views Adele as a tortured soul who had enough passion and love for both herself and the man of her dreams only to receive indifference and cold incredulity. It is a sad film but at the same time a film of remarkable human courage and persistence. Many would question Adele's motivations for doing the things she does, which seem to be purely selfish, but no one can question the heart and passion with which she does it.

Truffaut is usually such a high-spirited filmmaker that The Story of Adele H. comes as a great surprise. Isabelle Adjani plays a woman obsessed with a man who has no interest in her. Ultimately she convinces herself that she is in the middle of a great romance and loses touch with reality. By the end of the film she doesn't even recognize her great love anymore, since he exists far more in her mind than he ever has in her experiences. The daughter of Victor Hugo, Adele H. is desperate to create a life apart from her family, and she fixates on her imaginary love affair as her salvation. It's an odd, dark story, and Truffaut takes a determinedly direct approach to it, sacrificing some of the liveliness and cinematic flashiness of his other films but more than making up for it with a sharper focus and intensity. Adjani is brilliant. She makes no effort to win our sympathy or milk us for the pathos inherent in her situation, and the clean, even stark single-mindedness of her acting begins to take on a harsh grandeur as the film goes along. Though far from the most characteristic Truffaut film, this is one of his best.

Guilt or Passion? 8 Is guilt or passion the driving force behind Adele's obsession for Lt Pinson? I think the former. Maybe it's her re-current dreams of her older sister's tragic death by drowning, maybe it's her conscious guilt over that accident--she wished it because this sister was her father's dear favorite---but for me it's her ENIGMATIC SMILE while viewing her beloved's sexual encounter and her subsequent gift of a prostitute which argue even more deeply for guilt.For how can deep passion cut itself off from the body without abstracting itself? If her love was real, concrete, it was embodied. At that SMILE'S precise moment, passion/love must become guilt/penitence. Or, if this love started with guilt/penitence and Pinson is simply a stand-in for her dead sister, than all that can be left now is suffering. Because it is now brutally clear that the love she seeks--to heal her guilt--has been denied. The physical bond is severed. Pinson has stripped Adele of her body--and thus of her key to response. Now guilt has killed passion and has shut down possibility. Only suffering remains, and Adele's downward spiral into self-destruction has begun. Pinson's cold indifference, selfishness, and womanizing are now mere penance, which she can only passively endure. She may survive--and does, but not as a lover, saint or mystic.

Brilliant for the precise description of a very subtle frame of mind. Adele's ways are not obsession's expressions, not love or ambition. It is only necessity to live, to be, to build a sense without the protective father's shadow.And Adjani is charming in a great character who engrosses audience's energy. It is a desire's story but not only desire. It is a cruel adventure, mixed madness and ambition, Emma Bovary world's slices, fear and expectation and an absurd fight.It is a grotesque Don Quixote's story with oily nuances. Story of propriety like existence's purpose. The dream like escape and the rules like useless convention. In fact,a strange illustration of "Beyond Good and Evil".A beautiful film about desire's monstrosity,helplessness, misunderstanding,misfortune, illusion's honey and feeling's corpse.