The Consequences of Seduction: Adolphe

Benoit Jacquot's Adolphe was screened at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival, and elicited little response. The local press ignored it, the public did not welcome it at the screening we attended, and the influential trade paper Variety wasn't enthusiastic. The film will likely not receive North American distribution which is unfortunate as it is an intelligent, disciplined and creative work. In part this speaks of both contemporary attitudes towards the classical melodrama and films that are demanding. The film is based on a famous early 19th Century novel by Benjamin Constant about a young man, Adolphe/Stanislas Merhar, who seduces a woman approximately ten years his senior. Ellenore/Isabelle Adjani, once conquered, gives herself over to the relationship, abandoning the count/Jean Yanne, her protector, and her children. Adolphe cannot match her grand gesture. He is uncertain about his love for her and hesitant to dedicate himself fully to the relationship. The film depicts the battle of wills and needs that ensues. Ellenore wants a total commitment from Adolphe. Adolphe sees this as a claim on his freedom and masculine privilege. Ellenore, having sacrificed her name, reputation and children cannot accept anything less. In dealing with the theme of seduction, love and its ramifications, the film explores the underpinning network of gender and power that fuels the social world in which they move. Beneath the surface of courtship rituals and clever repartee are profound issues that lead to life and death choices. The narrative, with its sacrificing heroine, is familiar terrain of the melodrama. (Jacquot's previous film is an adaptation of Tosca). Max Ophuls' career, for example, was largely devoted to this subject matter (Ophuls long wanted to film Contant's Adolphe.) 'The Model', the closing episode of Ophuls' Le Plaisir (1952) was based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant and offers an interesting comparison. In the episode, a man, an artist, pursues a woman, a model, and after a conquest, he quickly loses interest in her. The woman insists on accountability and attempts suicide by jumping out of a window when the artist announces he is ending the relationship. (The film's cynical male narrator, who is also a participant in the narrative, voices his contempt of the woman's demands on the artist and his freedom.) The episode ends with a bitter irony. In the final shot, the viewer sees the artist and model together as a couple; he has become her caretaker as she crippled herself in the fall. Like Ophuls' Le Plaisir, Jacquot's Adolphe is complex in style and content. From the outset, the viewer is privy to Adolphe's thoughts through his voiceover narration; the film, however, doesn't solicit emotional identification with the character. The film encourages the viewer to take an analytical position. The pacing is slow and deliberate and marked by the repetition of a phrase of music which serves as a form of punctuation. We know from Adolphe's own words that he has calculated the seduction and grows tired of it once it is achieved; however, Ellenore gradually usurps and overrides Adolphe's control of the narrative. We see her vulnerability once she has committed herself to Adolphe, and witness her perform a series of transgressive acts, including the abandoning of her children, which bond her to him. The magnitude of Ellenore's commitment creates an emotional disturbance with which the viewer must contend. At the same time Adolphe too becomes increasingly vulnerable as he loses his footing in a familiar world that structures and codifies masculinity. He isn't prepared to confront the excesses of Ellenore's behaviour and her demands. (Adolphe, like Rodolphe in Minnelli's Madame Bovary (1949), thinks he is enjoying an affair with a worthy conquest. Ellenore, like Mme. Bovary, wants more than what is offered; both narratives use the situation to demonstrate the limits of the woman's position and the severe consequences that can result. …

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