The Wild Child [1970]

What does it mean to turn the raw material of life into a monument to one's own experience and bias? The question has all sorts of intriguing reverberations when one considers that Truffaut's own wild childhood was rescued by love of the cinema and that a degree of verisimilitude factors into his films starring Jean-Pierre Leaud--the troubled lad who grew up in Truffaut's work from The 400 Blows onward. (The Wild Child is dedicated to Leaud.) --Tom Keogh

In many ways this is a masterful and detailed account, based on Itard's own account, of his attempts to "civilise" 'Victor', at a time when debate raged, as it does still, about 'nature v nurture'. But it stops well before Victor's life played out to the age of 40, as a long-term inmate of an institution (he was almost certainly severely autistic - probably the reason he was abandoned - and thus his potential was always going to be limited), still devotedly cared for by Mme Guerin, who had been employed by Itard as housekeeper.

Itard gave up his quest to prove that the right (and it was extraordinarily well-thought-out, using many techniques still used today) education could do anything, after six years with Victor yielded only patchy results.


L'Enfant Sauvage   October 19, 2005
Roger Hall (Betchworth, Surrey United Kingdom)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

Skill of Truffaut is to persuade you that artifice is documentary. As much as one admire's the film-making intelligence, one is moved by the story. Movie storytelling at its most skillful and poignant.