"The Wild Child" (1970)

Truffaut revisits the 400 Blows with the true story of Victor, the wild child found and captured by hunters in a forest of Aveyron, subsequently disciplined and educated by the celebrated Dr. Jean Itard. The film is concerned with the remainder of purity left to a child past instruction, the artful artlessness of a child whose savage life had replaced the common inculcation of civilized children with the instinctual guile of beasts. With Truffaut's usual adept comprehension of children, the figure of Victor is stenciled out in a few strokes, using the velocity and compaction of a fugue to highlight the struggle for Victor's sensibility.

Vivaldi's concerto motif fits the theme: an inquisitive, melancholic strain that glides over the wild reeds of a childhood recaptured by force at first, but which ultimately awakens to a new discovery: a childhood recaptured by what it had initially escaped: education. For Truffaut, in his life and his work, childhood was a sentimental education, the constant evasion of cerebral duty and destructive emotion. The 400 Blows details the efforts by Antoine Doinel to flee the domestic scenes of mediocrity and quiet scandal that hemmed him in; rather than give in to his burgeoning emotions, Doinel chooses to runaway, to depart through the exit wound of his still tender heart, in search of the kind of intoxicant peace that only cinema provides. The film's cinematic majesty comes through in the silent film manner with which Doinel drifts through the frosty streets of Paris, in mute conversation with the world that had abandoned him to his devices, seeking an uncertain goal, a nameless destination (which we discover in the film's final immortal scene, when Doinel runs toward the ocean, at last arriving at the one element that could both restrict and free him from his inward struggle.) Doinel does not yet know that he was born to love cinema, that his life breathes its capricious aire, but it is our privilege to watch him as he is brought to realisation of his vita nuova.

Victor is the negative image of Antoine Doinel in that the former retains the esprit of the latter except through an inversion: if Victor had grown up in the parisian circumstance as Doinel did, they would have found themselves dear brothers. Doinel wants to escape into the wilderness of his soul, to flee from the sombre atmosphere of Paris to the oceanside; Victor desires nothing less than to keep to his wilderness, to preserve that wild sacred part of his life intact, as he is catechized into the modest conformity of the civilized.

It is noteworthy that Truffaut (who has intermittently acted in his own and in others' films before) takes the role of Dr. Itard. It may be suppositioned that this decision to play the other main role himself helped Truffaut's budgeting purpose, but one cannot help but sense that the director valued this film as enough a part of his own intimate existence as to confront it personally and directly; it were as if Truffaut were reexamining the essential ethos of his childhood through the investigative eye of himself as the adult figure, the spiritual father to the child. It is already well recorded that Truffaut had a difficult childhood, and that cinema was to him a reflection of the turbulence that he endured as a child; cinema was his escape from the crisis of his earliest situation, because in its mobility cinematic action perfectly mimicked his flight from it. Truffaut as Dr. Itard speaks quickly, almost madly in a kind of effort to explicate the reasoning in Victor's actions and customs; his conduct with Victor is both professional and humane, but by the end we realise that Dr. Itard is more a father to him than the detached and logical doctor: when Victor arrives home after running away for a few days, Dr. Itard belies his profession and affectionately welcomes Victor back to the domicile that has adopted him for good. We see that it has indeed pained him that his prodigal son had left home. Dr. Itard is the father that Truffaut never in his life knew (unless we count in Andre Bazin, who schooled Truffaut in the only real education he ever needed: cinema.)

When Dr. Itard looks out the window one night and finds Victor outside on all fours, scampering in the rain, his clothes muddied and his face beaming with worshipful pleasure, Dr. Itard does not question why Victor would do so, nor does it displease him as it would a normal father; rather, Dr. Itard speechlessly, wondrously, accepts that Victor will never be rid of the secret of his childhood that had sustained him all those years in the wilderness; the doctor intuits that in every child, whether savage or civilized, there lies an inner wealth of ecstasy which no quantity of instruction can diminish. The child's secret life cannot be penetrated by the civilized order of society - it must be allowed to grow on its own terms.