A Wild Child tale, slow-moving and overcautious, concerning a backwoods Carolina hermit (Jodie Foster), sole surviving half of a brace of twins, and speaker of her own private language. Somewhat unsurprisingly, it develops into simply another chapter in Hollywood's continuing romance of the simple and the primitive: the local doctor (Liam Neeson) and big-city psychologist (Natasha Richardson) do much more learning than teaching. (One of the things that puts Truffaut's Wild Child head and shoulders above the competition in this field is the filmmaker's honesty about his own position: if you had placed a tabula rasa personality in Truffaut's care, he'd have wanted to take him to a movie by Renoir, Hawks, Hitchcock. A Hollywood filmmaker will pretend to want to follow the Wild Child into the woods.) Dante Spinotti's photography, in its suavely sophisticated way, tries very hard to get into a State of Nature, but in the moonlit skinny dips it gets no further than Maxfield Parrish. In contrast, the introduction of the innocent to the "big bad world" of Charlotte, N.C., achieves a decent degree of wonder and bewilderment through odd croppings and unsteady movements, as if the camera, like the unaccustomed sightseer, doesn't know how or where to look. Directed by Michael Apted. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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