Cœurs Sombres | L’Histoire d’Adèle H. de François Truffaut

Wednesday, October 21, 2026 · 7:30 p.m.

Editorial

In the darkness of the cinema, Cœurs Sombres engages in dialogue with the ghosts of the nineteenth century, swept up in the torments of love, war and human anguish. The great passions of the Romantic century, splendid and suffocating, unfold before our eyes. Here, people love madly, sometimes to the point of oblivion; they venture forth at their own risk.

Sarah Yaacoub

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L’Histoire d’Adèle H.

by François Truffaut | 1975 | France | 1h36

“Sometimes I have violent yearnings for the great ideal […] sometimes I dream of a life burned, ardent, alive.” – Adèle Hugo

Isabelle Adjani is Adèle Hugo in L’Histoire d’Adèle H., giving voice and substance to a woman silenced because she was institutionalized by her family following what would today be interpreted as a nervous breakdown. François Truffaut is not the first of the feminists, but it hardly matters, since Adjani carries the film on her own. The porcelain-faced actress, with her anachronistic charm, takes on her first major role here and paves the way for a sumptuous gallery of Gothic heroines, from Nosferatu to La Reine Margot, via Emily Brontë for André Téchiné. Adèle flees her all-powerful patriarch in Guernsey for Halifax, Canada, where she joins Lieutenant Pinson and his angelic face. What path leads this delicate, talkative young woman toward the neurosis of one-sided love? Truffaut refuses to answer, preferring to speak of ghosts: Léopoldine, of course, whose memory of drowning haunts her younger sister, but also Victor, who is never shown yet whose power destroys his daughter’s life across borders. Thus, Romanticism is pushed to its limits, into its most morbid territory.

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