Film

In 1798, a boy (Cargol) was found living in the forests of Southern France, naked and filthy. No one knew where he’d come from or how long he’d been there; given that l’enfant sauvage was unable to communicate, he wasn’t exactly forthcoming. After being consigned to an institution, this feral youth was taken under the wing of Dr. Jean Itard (Truffaut), who began teaching him socialized behavior. He was given a name—Victor—as well as recalibrated senses, the building blocks of language and notions of a moral order. Taking the child out of the wild, of course, doesn’t mean the wild has been excised from the child.

It’s not surprising that François Truffaut would be attracted to this true story of Mother Nature versus civilized nurturing, or that cinematographer Néstor Almendros would deliver something so intimately gorgeous (the black-and-white images recall both daguerreotypes and paintings by Dutch masters). The shock comes from the director’s personal connection to the case study; though Truffaut plays the doctor, he clearly identifies with Victor. Such tender tales of juveniles as The Four Hundred Blows (1959) and Small Change (1976) have autobiographical aspects, yet almost nothing in his filmography resonates with as much sympathy as Victor’s longing while drinking water by an open window. (Substitute cinema, directly referenced by Itard’s later manipulation of light on a wall, for the outside world, and the moment suddenly speaks volumes about its creator.) And unlike the acting-histrionics competition in Hollywood’s The Miracle Worker (1962), Truffaut never upstages the astounding Cargol; both performers underplay in perfect harmony, turning the story into a duet of paternal affection and paradise lost.