1/11/2024 0 Comments The real wild child![]() Could the story, ‘of the evolution of animal into human also be a poetic metaphor for the re lationship between the ? Truffaut and the late ? Bazin, the French critic Truffaut credits with having given direction to both his career and his life? Itard, the man who, in effect, becomes the director of the wild child's metamorphosis, I assume that there will be future essays and theses pointing out that Truffaut here, as he has done in his Antoine Doinel films, still is reliving his own past, which has now been literally cloaked in masquerade. This is exactly what “The Wild Child” is, although it's a costume drama in which gentlemen wear silk plug hats, write -With quill pens and hunt with flintlocks (something I never really thoughttd see in a Truffaut film). Its theme is not, as the festival ads would have you believe, “that of ‘The 400 Blows’-the transformation of a boy into a man,” but the evolution of animal into human, which is some thing quite different, a theme so grand that any movie that contains it might be classi fied as quintessential science fiction. It is an almost literal drama tization of the records kept by Jean Itard, the Parisian doctor who in 1798 undertook the education of a “wolf boy” whom peasants had found living naked in the woods near Tarn. “The Wild Child” is also based on fact, and not even the names have been changed. “The Wild Child,” which is Truffaut's ninth feature film, is just such a sur prise, although there are superficial resemblances to “The 400 Blows,” which was also about an adolescent boy but which was an acknowledged film‐ clef based on the director's own childhood. There is such recognition, but for recognition to be rewarding, there must also be a feeling of surprise: “This film is unlike any other film made by X, yet only X could have made it.” Otherwise recognition collapses into the kind of trivia game that is played on afternoon television with a Whirlpool washer as first prize. This sense of continuity, how ever, should not be confused with what is simply the recognition of restated themes and repeated attitudes and ges tures. The operative phrase of this festival is a sense of continuity, between film making eras, among filmmakers them selves, as well as within individual careers. 20, is show ing us again (as Renoir has done) that it's possible for a film director, like a novel ist or a painter or a composer, to endure into a respectable age with his talent not just intact but deepened, more vital, his style so simple and straightforward it almost seems to be non‐style, and the content more com plex and less ambiguous than ever. Mar guerite Duras (“La Musica”) is now her own director, for better or worse, but Luis Bufiuel (now 70) whose “Tristana” will close the festival Sept. Chabrol screenings before they're over, and makes awesome, boring, beautiful film essays that he fondly believes are revolutionary acts (but that are, in fact, only revolutionary statements). “Les Biches” and “La Femme Infidele.” Godard (“Wind from the East”) no longer talks to Truffaut, stalks out‐ of. Chabrol, whose “Le Boucher” was shown at Philharmonic Hall last night, survived some very lean years to come‐ back triumphantly with. A lot of things have happened since 1959, of course. Frangois Truffaut” (which had simply been a ploy to secure fi nancing for the film).Īt this point in film history, there is something immensely reassuring in seeing that all of these people are still going-if not still going equally, strong -at the current New York festival. It was just a year after Claude Chabrol had made his first feature, “Le Beau Serge,” and it was the year in which Jean‐Luc Godard made his first, “Breathless,” based, say the credits rather airily, “on an idea by. That wad the year in which Truffaut's first feature, “The 400 Blows,” won the prize for best direction, in which Luis Bufiuel's “Nazarin” won the International Critics Prize, and in which the first feature by Alain Resnais, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” written by Marguerite Duras, was shown out‐of‐competitimi. BY an odd coincidence in program ing, the eighth New York Film Festival, which opened Thursday night at Philharmonic Hall with Francois Truffaut's “The Wild Child” (L'Enfant Sauvage), recalls the festival at Cannes in 1959.
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