The Story of Adele H.
|
List Price: Our Price: $7.16 You Save: $7.82 (52%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $3.72 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of The Story of Adele H.
Movie Review: Sad, facinating tale of a young woman's madness
Summary: 4 Stars
This is done in a semi-documentary style in that it switches back and forth between a narrative format and dramatic scenes. It deals with the life of the daughter of Victor Hugo and her obsession with a young British officer who lacks even the slightest interest in her. It was quite well done and visually beautiful, but a bit hard to take as she deteriorates from a beautiful, well-off young girl into a street crazy. Don't watch this if you are looking for a happy ending, feel-good sort of film or have a lot of scars from an unrequited love (a friend of mine couldn't finish watching it), but if you have an interest in 19th century culture and society it is worth your time.Movie Review: Very Good But Some Flaws
Summary: 4 Stars
Isabelle Adjani does a marvelous job of portraying the daughter of Victor Hugo, who is obsessively and unrequitedly in love with a soldier. However, there are some flaws in the film. At times it is curiously flat, which obsessive love stories rarely are. It also drags in spots which is unexpected for a Truffaut film. But a flawed Truffaut film is still a lot better than most other films. Adjani will strike you as incredibly restrained here if you compare this with her performance as Camille Claudel, where she is absolutely electric.Movie Review: Smokin' hot!
Summary: 4 Stars
Isabel Adjani may be playing a character with a loose screw. But I am telling you, the babe is smokin' hot!Movie Review: Incredible story of Victor Hugo's daughter
Summary: 3 Stars
This 1975 film by French director Francois Truffaut had been praised as great, profoundly beautiful and as 'one of the most romantic films of recent years' (Saturday Revue).
This film is a rich period piece with beautiful settings and average acting, but it is neither romantic, nor profoundly beautiful. It is the tragic story of the rapid decline into madness of a seriosly disturbed very pretty young woman, who happens to be a daughter of Victor Hugo, Adele .
There is nothing romantic about the obsession of a psychotic person who sinks deeper and deeper into her hell and the cruel rejection of her former suitor, a british hussar of questionable character. Adele has followed him from Guernsey, where the Victor Hugo family was in exile, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and continues to display increasingly irrational behaviour. She is also vicious and scheming when she doesn't get her way.
She eventually ends up on Barbados/ West Indies in the streets where a native woman takes pity on her, and takes her back to France where Hugo has reappeared in the meantime, because the political situation in France had changed.
He has her institutionalized for the next 40 years. Adele eventually died at a ripe old age of 85 in Paris in 1915, which the movie doesn't show. We see her last in the West Indies roaming the streets in her red torn gown. This is not romantic.
One does indeed wonder why none of her family came to her rescue, but 'pere' Victor must have been too busy with in his many extra marital affairs and only sent 'du fric' (money) , and 'maman' was probably busy with the same, before she took ill and left this mortal coil. Adele's astounding ecapades and general behaviour fit better into the late 20th or early 21st century, rather than into the late 1800's, but they show again that there is nothing new under the sun, least of all, psychosis and questionable morality.
Movie Review: Tragic, True Story Bogged Down by Repetitiveness
Summary: 3 Stars
This film tells the true tale of one of Victor Hugo's daughters who, obsessed in her love for a man who could seemingly care less about her, follows him to Canada and then to the Caribbean. She is a desperately unhappy and neurotic woman. If she were alive today she'd be on all sorts of mood altering drugs and receiving all sorts of therapy.
Her story is painful to watch as a result--it's not easy to watch someone spiral into madness. As a film, it's also somewhat difficult to watch because not much progress gets made. She starts out disturbed, she ends up disturbed, and she's disturbed all throughout the middle. The same point keeps getting made over and over again.
Of interest to those who love literature and like to know about great authors and their families, and to those who like period pieces and like to watch how different (and more difficult in many ways) life was back then. The acting is excellent overall, but the story pretty much is a one-note affair and, no matter how well that one note is hit, it can get wearisome to hear it over and over, esp. when it's so bleak.