The Wild Child
by Francois Truffaut
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Annie Miller, Francois Truffaut, Franoise Seigner, Jean Dast, Jean-Pierre CargolDirector: Francois Truffaut
Brand: TRUFFAUT,FRANCOIS
Writer: Francois Truffaut
Writer: Jean Gruault
Writer: Jean Itard
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 83 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-07-24
Audience Rating: G (General Audience)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Movie Reviews of The Wild Child
Movie Review: Truffau's Tarzan Movie
Summary: 5 Stars
Before getting this DVD I'd only seen this film once before on TV sometime in the late 1970's. It was refreshing to see it once again particularly the prestine black and white form in which it is presented here.The plot concerns the effort of a doctor, played by Truffaut himself, to educate a feral child that has been found in a forrest in a remote part of France. The story is told mainly through voice-over from a journal that we occasionally see Truffau writing and is supposedly based on true events that took place in the ninteenth centuary.
It is a beautifully observed film with understated and realistic performances from everyone involved in particular Jean-Pierre Cargol in the title roll as the boy who has lived in the forrest and become detached from society.
The strange thing about this film is it looks a lot older than it's 1969 production date and it is also strange that after two colour films Truffau went back to monochrome for this movie.
Truffau's doctor seems to be torn between emotional involvment with the child he eventually calls "Victor" and regarding his charge as a sociological experiment and that dilemma is at the heart of the film and is never really resolved even though his treatment of victor sometimes seems to owe more to Dr. Benjamin Spok than to ninteenth centuary child care techniques. Also when Victor is first examined by the doctor he comes to the conclusion that someone has at sometime tried to cut his throat but the doctor never tries to find out the identity of the attempted murderer or indeed the true identity of Victor himself. These aren't realy criticisms of the film so much as observations on how the film is presented although one thing that I would have welcomed would have been to have the voice- over in English as it is in the English versions of some of his other films; I find that having to read subtitles for both the dialoge and the voice-over is sometimes a bit waring and detracts from the excellent photography in this film.
In conclusion I feel this wonderful film is a neglected classic and I'm suprised that Hollywood hasn't remade it as it is such a great story.
Summary of The Wild Child
Acclaimed OscarÂ(r)-nominated* director François Truffaut (Small Change, Day for Night) has created an absorbing (Leonard Maltin) film about the true-life tale of a young boy found living alone in the woods of France in the 1700s. Using actual journal entries, Truffaut not only directed and co-wrote the script with Jean Gruault, but also starred as the unflappable Doctor Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, the visionary who takes on the incredible task of civilizing The Wild Child. At The National Institute for the Deaf and Dumb in Paris, a barely clothed and dirty young boy is admitted. Found in a forest, the child is unable to speak, communicate or function in society. Christened Victor by the hospital staff, his case is taken up by Doctor Itard (Truffaut),a lone physician who has an unyielding dedication to re-integrating the lad into society. But the road to tame the beast is a rocky one and Itard will have to work tirelessly to teach Victor how to re-claim his place in the world even if it means staking his reputation on it! *1974: Dayfor NightFrançois Truffaut's fascinating 1969 film, based on a real-life, 18th-century behavioral scientist's efforts to turn a feral boy into a civilized specimen, is an ingenious and poignant experience. 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 semidocumentary 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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