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Amazon.co.uk Review
An ingenious and poignant experience, Francois Truffaut's fascinating The Wild Child is based on a real-life 18th-century behavioural scientist's efforts to turn a feral boy into a civilised specimen. In a piece of resonant casting that immediately turns this story into an echo of the creative process, Truffaut himself plays Dr Itard, a specialist in the teaching of the deaf. Itard takes in a young lad (Jean-Pierre Cargol) found to have been living like an animal in the woods all his life. In the spirit of social experiment, Itard uses rewards and punishments to retool the boy's very existence into something that will impress the world. Beautifully photographed in black and white and making evocative use of such charmingly antiquated filmmaking methods as the iris shot, The Wild Child has a semi-documentary form that barely veils Truffaut's confessional slant.
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
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English
Region 2
Region 2
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating tale only partly told,
This review is from: Wild Child [DVD] [1970] (DVD)
It wasn't until I read the credits carefully that I realised the source of my "I've seen him before" reaction to the man playing Itard. Francois Truffaut! He also wrote and directed this version of (part) of the story of a teacher of the deaf who takes on the training of a 12 year old boy without language found running wild in the French forest shortly after the French revolution. 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.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Blast Of Humanity,
By Denis Joe "Denis Joe" (Liverpool, Britain) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Wild Child [DVD] [1970] (DVD)
The film is excellent. There is no point in my repeating what other reviewers have said. This film is a triumph of cinema because it tell of the triumph of the Enlightenment.
The acting, with the exception of Truffaut is excellent. But even then Truffaut's woodeness is convincing. I don't think that this story could be told with the same measure of humanity, today. in today's climate the only ending would be to send Victor back to the wilds. What is amazing about Truffaut is how he got the best out of his cast, but also how he did that with children (5000= Blows, for example). But In L'enfant savauge, Jean Pierre Gargol is incredible. This film should be shown to all the doom-mongers and misanthropes, whose voices hold sway these days. This film show what it is to be human.
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
L'Enfant Sauvage,
By Roger Hall (Betchworth, Surrey United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Wild Child [DVD] [1970] (DVD)
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.
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