François Truffaut’s factual, unembellished re-enactment of the events set down in a French doctor’s journal, having to do with the capture and gradual domestication of an adolescent found roaming the forests as a beast. The plain, semi-documentary style sits a bit strangely amid the quaint 18th-century trappings (ruffled shirts, horse-drawn carriages, etc.) and the silent-movie affectations (iris shots, stagy camera). The movie is adamant about denying its actual date, which is rather a surprise from a fashion-plate like Truffaut, and it pursues a scrupulous exactness about the physical properties of the bygone period: the starchy clothes, the antique household objects, and the commonplace sounds heard around these cramped old houses — the footfalls, the opening and closing of a door, the scritch-scratch of a quill pen. Truffaut’s tendency toward reckless sentimentality is held in harness here, thanks partly to Nestor Almendros’s calm gray images, partly to Truffaut’s stiff, toneless acting as the doctor, and partly to the unfaltering sense of rhythm. (1970) — Duncan Shepherd
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