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The affinity is closer with Godard's Le Gai Savoir than with Penn's The Miracle Worker, the nature of language via the image-sound-meaning system of cinema. The opening states François Truffaut's case study, Mowgli by way of Millet, with Griffithian irises for a screen on the cusp of the 19th-century. "A lively anxiety" describes the feral boy (Jean-Pierre Cargol), a mass of matted hair and filth who lopes on all fours and can chomp back at the hounds chasing him. Out of the Aveyron woods and into the Paris institute, a crash course in civilization under Doctor Jean Marc Gaspard Itard's tutelage: "What he'll lose in strength, he'll gain in sensitivity." The director portrays the diligent man of science as a way to direct the film both in front of and behind the camera, and to realize his own transition from wayward outsider to paternal comforter. The pupil drinks in everything with zest, "the windows barely seem wide enough for his eager gaze." Extensive labors, Vivaldi montages, the spiral on the blackboard. The senses figure mightily in the education, the breakthrough has the word "lait" pronounced in a squeezed lilt and spelled with wood blocks. A rare austerity from Truffaut, "a passion for order," a stark luminosity from Néstor Almendros. Wonder of candlelight, reward of sparkling water and pastoral vistas. The turning point is a purposely arbitrary act of injustice to rouse the youth's sense of revolt, the doctor is heartened by the frenzy of his reaction: "His bite filled with soul with joy." The mixed blessing of integration is reflected on the ambiguous look the "moral creature" shares at the close. Herzog in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser proudly sides with privitivism. With Françoise Seigner, Paul Villé, Pierre Fabre, and Jean Dasté. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |