Truffaut, in the Seventies, divided his time evenly between the serious and the frivolous; first one, then the other. This one belongs with the first type, along with Wild Child and Two English Girls, in ping-pong opposition to Bed and Board, Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me, and Day for Night. If this opposition also happens to separate his period pictures from his present-day pictures, it probably shouldn't be taken to mean that Truffaut, like the Thalberg-Selznick moguls of Hollywood Past, conceives of a "classy" movie in terms of horse-drawn carriages, ruffled cuffs, candles, and quill pens. But it probably could be taken to mean that his sensibility, when it is most nakedly exposed, is not quite of the present-day world. Even at his best, Truffaut tends to be precious, sentimental, wispy, and fey. In Adele H., he is dealing with a documented case of l'amour fou, the story of Victor Hugo's daughter who runs away from her famous father's home and bravely follows a kiss-and-run British soldier across the Pacific to his outpost in the New World. It is a tale of mismatched lovers, her wild, monomaniacal romanticism set against his stiff-necked pragmatism. And Truffaut, fueled by his own calculated, well-crafted, but timider brand of romanticism, urges us to see his moonstruck heroine as a sort of mystic, beyond reach, beyond reproach. With Isabelle Adjani. (1975) — Duncan Shepherd
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