François Truffaut's 1971 movie "L'enfant sauvage" (Wild boy) about bringing a non-newborn child into the human world was not a male-male remake of the Annie Sullivan-Helen Keller struggle in Arthur Penn's 1962 film "The Miracle Worker." A striking difference is that Truffaut gave his movie such a pastoral look that the child raised by wolves seemed considerably less cantankerous than the deaf-blind child Helen Keller. Penn (and playwright William Gibson) focused on the child's resistance, Truffaut on Progress in the 18th-century Enlightenment sense.

Whereas Helen Keller was completely cut off from the world, the wolf child had a world--not that of human society, but a world, nonetheless, when he was capture din 1798. He didn't know that he was a disadvantaged "subhuman" beast. He didn't realize there were numerous states of happiness and unhappiness and had to be taught to sneeze and to cry, to feel alienated, embarrassed about lacking clothes and property, etc. Viewing his life in the woods (as imagined by Truffaut and beautifully photographed by the great master Néstor Almendros), it is tempting to admire him and wish he could just remain uncivilized, though this courts the danger of all the swooning nonsense about "Noble Savages" (à la Rousseau) and the recurrent longing for the simple life of a presocial "state of nature." Although I do not think that we can return to the unconscious joys of precivilization, I would not feel impelled to rescue the child from it.

In himself playing the role of the "humanitarian" teacher Dr. Jean Ibert, Truffaut endorses the "rescue." The options as he presents them are (1) making a sideshow ("freak show") exhibit of the boy, (2) locking him in an asylum as hopelessly retarded, or (3) teaching him to be a useful member of society. The deck is stacked by ignoring a fourth option of leaving him ranging the woods. Probably, after he was discovered, this possibility was not possible. Still, I am not impressed by the "help" the child is given. Truffaut's paean to paternalistic coercion avoids the question of whether the boy is better off or could have been left on his own.

Things did not turn out so well for the boy in the real case on which the film was based (Ibert's Mémoires et rapport sur Victor de l'Aveyron. Victor never learned to speak, remained incapable of most takss,remained under the care of Mme. Guerin, and died in his early 40s. The civilizing mission was much less triumphant a victory for rational culture and medical surveillance than the film suggests. Truffaut (et al.) ignore that the positivist training rendered the child incompetent in both his old and his new worlds. To use the case as an example of what kindness and helpful rationalism can do for suffering (sub-)humanity, it is necessary to distort the actual results.

The narration (in English) to the sight of interminable (and uncinematic) penning in Ibert's journal makes the child an object. However, the eleven-year-old Jean-Pierre Cargol was so magnificent as the child that his charisma reduces the other characters to cardboard metaphors for "civilization" and its mission (colonizing those not blessed with education in French). Truffaut the actor (like Jules Dassin as another embodiment of education and high culture in "Never on Sunday") is rather dull.

The faith in reason seems 18th century, but the movie looks very 1920s with black-and-white cinematography (after Truffaut had made several films in color), iris-in/iris-out transitions between scenes, the discovery of a gifted child actor, and the unflagging belief in the colonial mission of Progress. Lovely to look and deeply ideological and dishonest, it is the best 1920s movie released during the 1970s. The 1798 case (and that of Kaspar Hauser in Germany around the same time) provided grist from debating nature vs. nurture, but the movie is far too inaccurate to be taken as evidence of anything whatsoever, despite the pseudo-documentary appearance and seeming to be transcribing the historical record (as Itard wrote it) to the screen

(The Criterion DVS is notably lacking in extra features other than a theatrical trailer.)

I'd give Truffaut's acting and directing 2 stars, 1 star for the ending that fails to indicate what happened to Victor, 1 star for casting himself instead of Jean-Pierre Leaud, 5 stars to Almendros's cinematography and Cargo's performance , and not recommend it to anyone interested in the case of the feral child as evidence of anything.


Recommended:
Yes

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