Wild at Heart

Francois Truffaut's The Wild Child

by Sam Adams

Recommended

Originally released in 1970, The Wild Child is one of François Truffaut's most personal movies, and one of his least sentimental. Truffaut, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jean Gruault, also plays the leading role of Jean Itard, an 18th-century man of science who takes on the task of socializing a feral child found in the woods outside Aveyron.

The story, which credits Itard's journals as its source material, is less obviously autobiographical than The 400 Blows, but the parallels with Truffaut's life are profound. Like the child, whom Itard dubs Victor (Jean-Pierre Cargot), Truffaut was essentially left to fend for himself as a child, abandoned by his father and ignored by his mother. And, like Victor, he was taken in by a surrogate father whose affection and guidance helped integrate him into the social world.

Truffaut's Itard is a stern and exacting father figure whose primary inheritance is the gift of order. The film's pristine black and white — represented in a new print struck by the tiny, discerning outfit The Film Desk — subliminally embodies the certainties Itard attempts to pass on to his unsocialized subject. When the boy takes a step toward his goal, he is not rewarded with sweets or coos, but a glass of water. Truffaut's narration (in French, although the film was originally released here with an English soundtrack) adds another layer of clinical remove.

When he is entrusted to Itard's care, Victor is apparently both deaf and mute, but Itard's patient experimentation reveals him to a have a functional, if idiosyncratic, sense of hearing. He responds to the creak of a door, but not the sound of a shot. The very nature of language escapes him: He learns, through repetition, to speak the word for "milk," but it takes much longer for him to learn that the one can be used to ask for the other.

Although he achieved breakthroughs in the field of otology and helped lay the foundations for Montessori schooling, Itard's work with "the wild boy of Aveyron" was not considered one of his great successes. Subsequent generations of scientists have theorized that Victor was either mentally retarded or severely autistic, and thus impervious to many of Itard's methods. But Truffaut doesn't try to end the film on a triumphant note. He closes on a ambiguous freeze-frame, deliberately evoking the end of The 400 Blows, which throws even Itard's minor victories into question. The Wild Child is superficially poignant, but more profoundly troubling, and more powerful for the way Truffaut navigates between the two.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

The Wild Child | Written and directed by François Truffaut | A Film Desk release | Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse