Apart from making resolution lists, editing them, brooding over life, indulging in useless shopping ventures, and watching sunsets, I managed to spend time watching films. The recent one that i saw was The story of Adele H' by Francois Truffaut.
What really hits hard about the film is its simple yet poignant narration of unrequitted love and subsequent self-destruction. A lilting film with a tidal pull to it. It's about a woman who is destroyed by her passion for a man who is indifferent to her - a woman who realizes herself in self-destruction.
Adele, the daughter of writer Victor Hugo, and her obessive neurotic love for naval officer Lieutenant Pinson. This film is so totally concentrated on one character. We become as much absorbed in Adele as she is in Lieutenant Pinson. And explains the nature of neurotically willed romanticism through the character. The subject of the movie is the self-destructive love that everyone has experienced in one form or another and the riveting character of Adele goes all the way with it.
You believe her capable of anything, because you can't see yet what she is. To get her love, she fools herself to believe a magician, destroys Pinson's hope of happiness by claiming to his fiancee's father, that Pinson is married to her, changes her identity as Mrs. Pinson. But at the end, losing her mental balance and fails to recognise him.
1 comment:
I saw Adele H over 30 years ago when it first came out. It left an indelible memory of the destructiveness of an obsessive passion. I like what you said, that it's a story of a woman who realizes herself in self-destruction. That statement says so much about the extremes to which one will go to find some meaning or purpose in one's life. All literature, it seems to me, is a warning and a reminder of the devastation brought on by that kind of passion.
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