L’Enfant Sauvage [The Wild Child] ***** (1969, François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Cargol) – Classic Movie Review 3016

Director François Truffaut’s 1969 masterwork is a superbly handled, brilliantly evocative re-creation of the 1790s true-life story of Doctor Jean Itard, the behavioural scientist who tames and teaches Victor de l’Aveyron (Jean-Pierre Cargol), a feral boy found wild in the woods near Aveyron.

In 1798 French countrymen catch a wild child who cannot walk, speak, read or write. The boy interests Doctor Itard, who plans to try to educate him, though everyone thinks he will fail. But, with love and patience, Itard eventually manages to encourage the child to continue with normal development.

Cargol commands your heart and Truffaut’s own involving touching and layered performance as the doctor, Dr Jean Itard, is high among the film’s many virtues too.

Writing the screenplay with Jean Gruault, Truffaut draws out all the poignancies and ironies in the fascinating story that forms the flip side to The Elephant Man, while establishing and developing a beautiful heart-rending relationship between the surrogate father and child. The screenplay is based on Jean Itard’s book Memoirs et rapport sur Victor de l’Aveyron.

A film to rank alongside Truffaut’s own Les Quatre Cents Coups among the cinema’s greatest films about children, L’Enfant Sauvage is neatly dedicated to actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, who starred as the Truffaut surrogate character in Les Quatre Cents Coups, and in the semi-autobiographical Antoine Doinel series that followed. As ever, Truffaut turns in a handsome looking film and cinematographer Nestor Almendros makes it look beautiful too in black and white.

Truffaut writes with regular collaborator Jean Gruault, who died on June 8 2015, aged 90. Their other notable works include Jules and Jim (1962), Anne and Muriel (1971) and The Green Room (1978).

Gruault wrote 25 screenplays between 1960 and 1995. His screenplay for Alain Renais’s Mon oncle d’Amérique (1980) was nominated for an Oscar and a César and won a David di Donatello Award. He also contributed to Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us (1960) and The Nun (1966); Roberto Rossellini’s Vanina Vanini (1961) and The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966); Jean-Luc Godard’s Les carabiniers (1963); Chantal Akerman’s The Eighties (1983) and Golden Eighties (1986); and Resnais’s Love Unto Death (1984).

Classic Movie Review 3016