THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Cohn L. Jr.
B ~ I E ~ O 0 0 e O 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCNEEN Like Blake's tiger, Frang:ois Truffaut's career has been framed with "fearful symmetry." His filmography is a veritable ark of movies, each film...
...Part of what makes The Story of Adele H. moving, then, is just its resonances with Truffaut's earlier work...
...What fascinates.Truffaut in this tragic story are the same revelations of human nature that have preoccupied him for years: the contrasts between private and public life, between romantic aspiration and daily reality, between indoors and outdoors...
...Just after she arrives in Halifax, there is a scene where Adele passes an English lieutenant in the street~ and so anxious is she to find Pinson again ', she doubles back to accost this fellow who of course turns out not to be Pinson at all In Barbados when the orderly tells Pinson Adele is there, that scene where Adele chases after the wrong man recoils on itself once and for all...
...Intricate symmetries like this mark all the reversals of fate that befall Adele in TruffauFs film...
...A commonplace shot or image may take on, from its context, a unique and extraordinary significance...
...For every force at work in Truffaut's imagination, there is an equal and opposite counter-force...
...On another night Adcle goes to a part,,,, disguised as a man and gets Pinson's orderly to bring him out to her...
...Having begun his feature work with The 400 Blows, which takes a sympathetic view of an incorrigible boy, Truffaut ten years later made The Wild Child, which sympathizes with an adult's efforts to tame an incorrig~le boy...
...His filmography is a veritable ark of movies, each film having its mate, its opposite number, somewhere else in his work...
...Having ascended one stairs to spy on Pinson while he-seduces another woman, Adele subsequently descends a second stairs in a public street to hire a prostitute, a look-alike of sorts, whom she sends to Pinson with her complimeats...
...An image like the window is, in his treatment of it, so richly ambiguous that each successive film transforms it into something new...
...As Pinson seduces the woman in her drawing room, Adele watches from the garden outside...
...But she just stares at him vacuously, numbly, and passes by without stopping, unable any longer even to recognize this man whom she has literally destroyed her own sanity to have...
...And if one has liked that past work very much, it be...
...To the unsympathetic viewer it must seem that Truffaut is simply someone who quotes himself a lot--a director who keeps returning to images out of past films because, perhaps, he cannot think of new ones...
...In the context provided by this repetithan, as well as the dream of Leopoldine's drowning, the shot of Adele's face floating over the sea reflects a bitter irony...
...and every time she has one Truffaut shows us a sequence, superimposed on the sleeping Adele's face, in which Leopoldine disappears into the water beneath the heavy folds of her dress...
...She has constant nightmares about the drowning of her older sister Leopoldine...
...Pinson (Bruce Robinson) on a rendezvous he has with another woman...
...This time it is Pinson who goes into the street to confront her, stalking her down alleys and by-ways just as she has stalked him from Europe to the New World and from the frigid zone to the tropics...
...The whole scene transpires on a terrace and stairway that is enclosed in windows like a greenhouse, and the camera remains outside, watching the intrigue at a distance even after Adele herself has gone in...
...This all-or-nothing attitude which Truffaut's work seems to demand is of course the attitude he himself took toward filmmakers when he was a critic...
...Even now, after thirteen features, a few, central concerns with which he began have still not exhausted themselves...
...This is when Adele writes to her father, falsely, that Pinson has agreed to marry her...
...Where Truffaut's epirode for Love at Twenty ends with still photos of anonymous lovers on the Paris streets done by France's most renowned photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Adele H. ends with unattributed photographs of the state funeral accorded Victor Hugo...
...There can't be, not now that he has come this far...
...It is a place where each of them can be seen from the perspective of the other...
...In Adele H. one of the more pitiful scenes occurs when Adele (Isabelle Adjani) follows her faithless Lt...
...Where the unknown boy in The 400 Blows makes a little shrine to Balzac, in Adele H. the daughter of Victor Hugo --"the most famous man in the world," someone tells Adele's landlady--makes a similar shrine to an unknown English lieutenant...
...The conclusion of Adele's quest to which this leads is a surprising and painful one...
...Whatever contribution Adele H. may make to Truffaut's career as a whole, though, it would be a mistake for me to leave the impression that it can't stand by itself...
...From details like these to its general conception, Adele H. is part and parcel with all Truffaut's earlier work...
...He is the supreme dialectician of life, finding always within himself the antithesis for every thesis...
...It is not the poverty of his ideas, however, but their wealth that makes him go over them again and again...
...But within a single film like Adele H. something quite comparable can happen too...
...Truffaut brings to bear on this scene the accumulated power not only of all the scenes that have preceded it in Adele H., but of all the films that have preceded it in fifteen years of directing...
...The result is that, the further along Truffaut's career progresses, the harder it is to respond to any new film by itself...
...and when it was transferred to Barbados in the West Indies, she pursued him there as well...
...The tragedy was compounded, Adele confides to her landlady, because Leopoldine's husband drowned too out of desperation at his inability to save her...
...And when he takes the woman upstairs to her bedroom, Adele likewise ascends the stairs of some abandoned out-building on the property, closing herself info a cold and unlighted upper room through whose glassless windows she watches Pinson behind an opposite set of windows making love to the other woman...
...All the complex and sustaining symmetries of Truffaut's work are not only elaborated by this film, but contained by it as well...
...His own filmmaking stands as justification for the "politique des auteurs" he proposed at Cahiers du Cinema over twenty years ago...
...Based on diaries that were left behind by Victor Hugo's daughter Adele, the film recounts her disastrous love for a British cavalry officer when she was young...
...Consider the use Adele H. makes of superimpositions, which are a simple (and often lifeless) optical effect...
...comes harder and harder even to suppose that one might dislike some new film...
...Again, the shot harks back to earlier Truffaut films-to Two English Girls, for example, where a shot of the hero's mother is superimposed on scenery outside a train carrying him away from her...
...At last he decides to have it out, approaching her as she walks and calling out her name...
...I have just said that a Truffaut film which at first may seem ordinary by itself becomes more interesting when looked at in relation to his other work...
...But what gives the superimposition Truffaut uses here its singularity is the way he uses the same effect at one other point in the film...
...Where Mississippi Mermaid takes us from the tropical climate of the French colony on Reunion to the snowbound French Alps, AdeIe H. takes us from Nova Scotia to Barbados...
...It is just another band woven into the whole-cloth of his career...
...She does not seek out the orderly this time, but he does see her in the street, and again goes at once to tell his master...
...Unable to bear his rejection of her, she followed him to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where his regiment was garrisoned...
...As the letter is on its way to Europe, Truffaut does a traveling shot on water, as if we were actually aboard the packet steamer carrying the mail, and over the ground swells gliding beneath us, he superimposes the face of Adele reading the letter's contents aloud...
...Nothing could demon~ strate this more surely than that scene in which Adele spies on Pinson's love-making, and there is, no doubt, more to come . . . . COLIN L. WES'rERBECK, JR...
...Since such devotion is the exact opposite of what Adele gets from Pinson~ it's no wonder she is obsessed with Leopoldine's fate...
...Commonweal: 147...
...On recent re-seeing, even The Solt Skin, which I had always thought of as his least successful film, redeemed itself surprisingly in the context of his other work...
...The lie Adele is telling in her letter home takes on an added gravity when put like this, in the light of the truth about Leopoldine's d~ath...
...The stairs, windows and removed vantage point all make this scene a peculiar echo of the one where AdeIe watches Pinson with that other woman, but at the same time this scene also looks forward to yet another later on, after Adele goes to Barbados...
...The magic with which she speaks of being transported in the fantasy sequence seems to be realized by this superimposition, except that its voyage is back towards Europe, not towards her lover, and the romantic fantasy has turned into a vengeful lie to sustain itself...
...There are more and less important films in Truffaut's filmography, but there are no bad films...
...In theinterim, she dogged him with letters, visits and threats in Halifax, she ruined his engagement to a local woman, and she finally drove herself into a state of both destitution and distraction...
...Each work is so richly entangled with all the films that have preceded it, it seems Truffaut's whole career must be reviewed with each new film that appears...
...In that shot, Adele's face is the ground rather than the superimposed image, so we see her there, like Leopoldine herself, beneath the water rather than on top of it...
...While she may daydream of nothing except Pinson, (Continued on page 147) Commonweal: 143 at night Adele dreams of something quite different...
...A window is a place where outdoors and indoors--nature and civilization--meet...
...It is also the place where our private lives become public, where our immured acts can be glimpsed from the street, or can break out of their concealment and confinement...
...The most persistent imagery in Truffaut's films is that of windows...
...But more important, this shot of Adele superimposed on water--floating on the water, as it were--reminds us of the superimposition where we saw Leopoldine drowning...
...That Adele must pretend Pinson is devoted becomes the more pathetic because it is thrown into relief against the proven devotion of Leopoldine's husband...
...This is a considerable experience, especially since Truffaut has the ability to draw upon it so fully...
...Having based Jules and Jim on Henri-Pierre Roche's novel about two men in love with the same woman, ten years after that Truffaut made Two English Girls, based on the same writer's novel about two women in love with the same man...
...Again here too, in order to give us a sense of d3]~ vu and make us feel the futility of everything Adclc has been through, Truffaut locates Pinson in a courtyard, an open-air one now, where the orderly once more climbs a staircase to find his master with another woman--a woman who is, we realize as soon as the orderly addresses her, Pinson's wife...
...Early in the film Truffant shows us a fantasy sequence in which Adele stands near the edge of the sea (in which, the way the shot is framed, she seems almost to stand on the sea) and again apparently reciting from a letter, tells how "a girl should walk on the water.., to rejoin her lover...
...This is the essence of Adele's romantic illusions, of course, and Truffaut repeats the sequence at the end of the film...
...In film after film--Jules and Jim, Love at Twenty, Bed and Board, Two English Girls, Day lor Night--we find people confronting each other out windows that face across some open terrain...
Vol. 103 • February 1976 • No. 5
