What’s he doing here? When Isabelle Adjani spotted François Truffaut in September 1974 at the premiere of The Slap, directed by Claude Pinoteau, she recognized him immediately. He was riding high from Day for Night, which had won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film just a year earlier. But neither Pinoteau nor Adjani’s co-stars, Lino Ventura and Annie Girardot, belonged to Truffaut’s cinematic family. In fact, this comedy epitomized the very brand of polished “quality French cinema” once scorned by the New Wave upstarts – Truffaut among them.
If Truffaut was in the theater that night, it was for her. He made sure to greet the young actress, who was about to score her first big box-office hit with The Slap. What she didn’t know was that she had already become the director’s fixation. Truffaut had been obsessed with her since May 1973, when he saw her on television in The School for Wives, staged at the Comédie Française. Never before, he confided, had an actress made him cry watching TV. He felt an urgent need to “work with her right away, without delay.”
As was often the case, after falling head over heels for an actress, Truffaut already had a screenplay ready. “He loved being struck by a woman’s face,” Adjani later said. “And he was delighted to have scripts waiting in a drawer that would be revealed by someone. It was the actress who reveals the story, not the story that chooses the actress.”
Truffaut had been working for four years on adapting a fragment from the diary of Adèle Hugo, Victor Hugo’s second daughter. In 1863, at 33, Adèle was consumed by a one-sided passion for a British officer. It drove her to cross the Atlantic under a false name, first to Halifax, Canada, then to the Caribbean. Each time, he rejected her. She eventually lost her mind.
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