The Wild Child - Plot

Plot

The film opens with the statement: "This story is authentic: it opens in 1798 in a French forest."

One summer day in 1798, a naked boy eleven or twelve years of age (Jean-Pierre Cargol) is found in a forest in the rural district of Aveyron in southern France. A woman sees him, then runs off screaming. She finds some hunters and tells them that she saw a wild boy. They hunt him down with a pack of dogs (a Beauceron, a German Shepherd, an Airedale Terrier and an English Springer Spaniel). The dogs, upon picking up the boy's scent, chase him up a tree. A branch breaks off, and the dogs attack him when he falls. He fights them off leaving one wounded, then continues to flee and hides in a hole. The dogs continue to follow his scent, eventually finding his hiding hole. The hunters arrive and force him out of the hole using smoke to cut off his air supply. After he emerges, the men grab him.

Living like a wild animal and unable to speak or understand language, the child has apparently grown up in solitude in the forest since an early age. He is brought to Paris and initially placed in a school for "deaf-mutes". Dr. Jean Marc Gaspard Itard (François Truffaut) observes the boy and believes that he is neither deaf nor, as some of his colleagues believe, an "idiot". Itard thinks the boy's behavior is a result of his deprived environment, and that he can be educated.

Itard takes custody of the boy, whom he eventually names Victor, and removes him to his house on the outskirts of Paris. There, under the patient tutelage of the doctor and his housekeeper (Françoise Seigner), Victor gradually becomes socialized and acquires the rudiments of language.

There is a narrow margin between the laws of civilization in rough Parisian life and the brutal laws of life in nature. Victor finds a sort of equilibrium in the windows that mark the transition between the closed interiors and the world outside. But he gains his ability to have social relations by losing his capacity to live as a savage.