On Screen

...With his faithful servant Saturna, they subsist on whatever he can get from hocking family heirlooms...

...Nothing is motivated or analyzed...

...For example, when Antonio's father has a documentary of the Civil War screened for his amnesiac son, we are drawn into Antonio's bewilderment as bedraggled troops hurtle on while a female voice recites verses from Ruben Dario...

...neither the screenplay nor the direction manages to soar above the usual boy-and-his--(you fill in the name of the creature) story...

...unless it does, we'll be deprived of what I consider, after Bergman's A Passion, the best film of the year...

...The boy suffers a relapse, returns to nature, finds that he is no longer equipped for the wild life, distressedly comes back to the doctor who happily continues his education...

...The pig hustled through the living room, an actress being made up to look like Antonio's dead mother, the father wearing a ludicrous toupee to become his former self, the house being refurbished to appear as it did decades ago, the phonograph playing a dripping popular song of the time crooned by Imperio Argentina and bearing the ironic title "Recollection," a helpless grown man mumbling "No...

...After he makes some further progress, the uncomprehending boy is told by Itard that he is no longer a beast though not quite yet a man...

...Thus the boy-bird scenes are relatively sparse and underdone, whereas a comic soccer game and other school disasters are overextended, funny though they be...

...but Dr...

...Nevertheless, she marries him, and treats him as shrewishly as possible, denying herself to him sexually both before and after the wedding...

...Both the facts and the legends attached to the case are absorbing, and Kaspar Hauser has been the subject of many works of prose and verse, among which Jakob Wasserman's novel is the most important...

...The concluding scene, Antonio's abdication, his opting out, is conveyed by a visual metaphor that is strikingly simple yet rich in overtones, and a fitting climax for this adult and intelligent film...

...Tristana develops a tumor in one leg, thinks she will die, insists that she be taken back to Lope, which Horacio obligingly does...

...This boy, found in a hollow tree near Nuremberg in 1828, proved eminently intelligent, and was mysteriously killed five years later...

...The old masters were represented at the Festival by Bunuel's Tristana...

...A tidily directed film, it is based on a novel by the Spanish Balzac, Perez Galdos, from whom Bunuel previously derived his Nazarin...

...The impact of the film is due in large measure to him, and I can only hope that he will evolve more pleasantly than that other Truffaldian Jean-Pierre, the by now insufferable Leaud, to whom the film is dedicated...

...When the boy was captured and transported to Paris, experts were all set to condemn him to an institution for the hopelessly retarded...

...Back when he was a problem child, the young Tristana already felt a queer kinship for him...

...As penetratingly as it uses images, sounds, dialogue, even single lines, the film uses music, too...

...neither handsome nor plain, he is actually, or artistically, all spontaneous naturalness...

...similarly, the luminously soaring bird is the opposite of the grimy descent into the coal pits, which Billy will not tolerate...

...That we have to unscramble it gradually, makes the weirdness more dizzyingly alive...

...Another film with a juvenile protagonist, Truffaut's The Wild Child, was the Festival opener and arrived with considerable advance fanfare...

...Billy steals a kestrel chick from its nest, and, with a likewise stolen book on falconry, proceeds to tame and train the bird...

...Ken Loach's film is the story of Billy, a small squelched boy in a shabby Yorkshire mining town, who has a bullying wretch of an elder brother and an absentee mother...

...Don Lope's character is more real--though even here there are some disturbingly unanswered questions--and he is thoroughly humanized by Fernando Rey's warm portrayal, a further refinement of a role Rey created in Viridiana...

...There is ambivalence here...

...Itard's diary fairly closely, I gather, in retracing the difficult, tentative steps of the boy's progress: the ingenious yet simple experiments...

...Itard is not without wistfulness about the natural existence from which Victor has been wrenched, and Almendros' otherwise chaste cinematography gets almost lush in some of the forest scenes...

...The evocative music clings to the pair on their sentimental walk through the park...

...He takes the boy to his suburban house, complete with a large, kindly housekeeper, Mme Guerin, and proceeds to civilize him patiently, strenuously, and with a nice blend of sternness and humanity...

...It is the late 18th-century true story of a wild boy, aged 12 or 13, who was discovered running about naked and on all fours in the woods of Aveyron, France, and was presumed to have been brought up by wolves...

...In the part of Saturna, Lola Gaos oozes decency and dignity, and there is much to be said for the somber, burnished look with which Jose Aguayo's camera endows the remoter byways of Toledo...

...Saura helps with camera angles that are just a little odd, and timing full of creative dawdling...

...In a sense, the tight, geometrical, syllogistic movement of the film conveys the mechanistic, rationalistic, positivist concepts of life and society in the 18th century...

...The scenes in which the greedy family tries to jog, jolt or needle Antonio's memory back into functioning are all perfect blends of the hilarious and gruesome, and at the same time comment wryly on present-day Spanish society...

...The remaining Festival films were promptly available in general showings, and one, Kes, has already bit the dust...

...When the auto accident responsible for his amnesia is conjured up by Antonio as happening on the spacious lawn that sprouts memories and daymares, we hear him moan out a line he has spoken before, but taking on full significance as he slumps, bloodied, behind the wheel, and once we have seen sequence after sequence of familial brainwashing: "Do what you like with my body," he groans, "but do not touch my head...

...She meets a handsome young painter, Horacio, practically flings herself at his feet, conveys to him her intense hatred for Don Lope, and after he has buffeted her about a little for no longer being a virgin, and has likewise punched Don Lope in the nose for being an old goat and having conceived the ridiculous notion of challenging him to a duel, Tristana gets Horacio to elope with her...

...just before they get out of the car, she starts the lovely slow movement of Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez" on the car cassette-player...

...Not adorable, yet fetching...

...Young David Bradley plays Billy with an authenticity that is rather too literal, and for all its honestly bitter taste, Kes is a bit like a tall glass of warm, flat porter...

...Or take the opening scene when Antonio, in his wheelchair, is forced into a room of the sumptuous family house with a large, stentorian pig, to recreate the occasion when, as a five-year-old, he was locked into the pigsty as punishment for some petty offense...

...Don Lope sinks into senility and becomes quite friendly with the clergy who come around to sponge a little...

...When Don Lope can no longer resist Tristana, whom he asked to regard him as a father, he persuades her to regard him as a husband as well...

...every weird switch has to be taken on faith...

...Though unenthusiastic, the girl becomes his mistress without demur, in an almost uncannily matter-of-fact way...

...Her heart, to be sure, is not in it, especially since he is a jealous old goat...

...But Truffaut apparently wants to tell us that, however exhilarating the freedom of the forest animals may be, becoming a social animal is better...

...Then there is the scene where Antonio's wife drives him back to a park and fountain in Aranjuez that have romantic associations for them...

...she even plays the piano quite nicely, but is full of contempt for Lope's doting love...

...Jean-Pierre Cargol, the gypsy boy whom Truffaut dug up to play Victor, is very good...

...The elaborate narration from Itard's journal (delivered by Truffaut himself in rather awkward English), and the severe black-and-white cinematography of Nestor Almendros, bespeak a bygone era while also contributing Brechtian verfremdung...

...the film...

...Tristana's leg is amputated, Horacio is sent packing...

...The Yorkshire accents are genuine to the point of impenetrability, the photography is routine, and Loach lacks a sense of rhythm and proportions...

...The Civil War emerges as a tasteless joke here, a cheap trick to bring back a misplaced memory, and even that only to recoup the money locked up in that memory...

...It is as if the Doctor--or Truffaut--had to prove to himself as well that the civilized state is superior, so that the zeal and effort were expended not only in behalf of science and the child...

...The fact that Truffaut himself plays Itard rather inflexibly and self-consciously, as directors often will, increases the alienation effect...

...We grasp this is what the family has been doing to him, from infancy to amnesia: messing with his head...

...The relationship between hawk and boy contrasts with the child's unhappy school and home drudgery...

...Thus, while removing his toupee, the father assures the family that he pitied his son even when he was first obliged so to punish him: "For years the poor boy would see himself surrounded by pigs...

...Tristana grows bitterer and meaner, does not call the doctor when the old man lies abed in chills and fever, indeed opens the window at dawn, so that he is sure to catch his death, and she to inherit his wealth...

...as a nurse wheels him toward a carved oaken door from behind which malevolent oinks are hitting him in the face, a whole family in a hubbub to make the wretched re-enactment come off--all this gains immeasurably in effectiveness by Saura's dumping it in our laps without explanation...

...the occasional triumphant leaps ahead often followed by retrogression...

...In order to make that point, he has to cut off his story early, and that makes for an undramatic and dishonest ending...

...Not exactly a splendid success for culture and medical science...

...This Tristana is an innocent young orphan girl in Toledo circa 1920 (updated from the novel), who becomes the ward of Don Lope, a former admirer of her mother's...

...Shockingly, The Garden of Delights has not acquired an American distributor...

...As long as Truffaut was going to make a film about a wild child (and there were several cases of unwanted and abandoned children surviving in the woods), I wish he had picked the much more interesting case of Kaspar Hauser...

...When Antonio envisions the Civil War as a. pitched battle between two gangs of children hurling stones at one another from behind wooden shields--again on that lawn of the garden of delights--the sound track gives out with Prokofiev's battle music from Alexander Nevsky...

...The result is that Horacio is forthwith despised by Tristana as a weakling, Lope resolves never to let the girl go again and takes care of her in grand and loving style...

...But such complexity, if it was intentional, would require a richer script and a better actor than Truffaut to bring it out...

...Still, U Enfant sauvage is a nice enough minor film, and worthier of Truffaut's talents than the brides and mermaids he has been dabbling with of late...

...The film...

...The film follows Dr...

...The facts of the case are that the real-life Victor never properly learned to talk, remained incapable of all but menial tasks, stayed under Mme Guerin's care, and died in his eary 40s...

...the almost disheartening slowness of it all brightened by modest advances...

...A charming, impoverished elderly roue, he still cannot resist a pretty girl and lives by a chivalric code of genteel poverty and fierce anticlericalism...

...Vazquez' expressions--the way he wiggles his eyes, the ruffling and unruffling of his brow--are unsurpassable in their bedeviled, funny-sad grotesquerie...

...The girl, though somewhat embittered, manages well enough with her artificial limb (on which Bunuel dwells with his customary fetishism...

...But despite increased naturalism...

...now that he is a rather sullen servant to Don Lope, she resists his advances but shows her naked breasts to him from the balcony while he gapes upward in mute torment...

...Truffaut uses a deliberately old-fashioned technique: simple decor, stiff camera setups and less than fluid movements, much irising in and out of scenes, and a patchwork of brief sequences that is suggestive of the one- and two-reelers of yesteryear...

...But neither Catherine Deneuve nor Franco Nero can act beyond a pout or grimace (one almost feels that the dubbing into Spanish helps their performances--though, alas, not enough), and Tristana leaves one with a sense of forced oddity, wilful distortion, wasted directorial skill...

...Throughout the film, dialogue has this kind of savage resonance...

...We learn that they have been living together quite well, comfortably but not luxuriously--whereas Lope has inherited a fortune from his devout sister who did not talk to him during her lifetime...

...Incisively photographed by Luis Quadrado, the film is directed with the unassuming smoothness that Saura must have learned from his master, Bunuel at his best...

...Within this appalling, brilliant context even individual lines assume ominous intensity...

...With sudden, cruel comedy, the father bursts through the screen in Phalangist uniform, back from the wars and trumpeting the victory...

...Even if Bunuel had not worked in some of his usual tricks, such as Tristana's recurrent nightmare in which Don Lope's severed head appears to her as the clapper in a giant bell, the film still would not make sense because the heroine's eccentricities and turnabouts remain as unsounded as they are unsound...

...She now gets her kicks from playing strange games with Saturna's deaf-mute son...

...There is a magnificent contradiction between that noble, patriotic music and these nasty, senseless little games that become earnest and horrible as the shields and the foreheads behind them begin to crack open...

...And the film ends on the hopeful note of Victor, as Mme Guerin named the child, learning and developing...

...but the quick preceding shot of a gloved hand locking the cassette into place and calculatingly starting up the mechanism with that insinuating second movement, undermines, even cancels, the music's tenderness...

...The Garden of Delights is full of bizarre felicities, not the least being the casting of the noted comic actor, Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez, in the serious yet also somewhat absurd part of Antonio...

...Jean Itard, a specialist in the training of the deaf, convinces colleagues and authorities that he can redeem this child for human society...

...the son keeps muttering, and indeed, as the woman's voice sobbingly declaims on, the film continues to lurch across the shattered screen, looking as unvictoriously frazzled as Antonio, whom his father is already dragging toward a new ordeal...

...I have not read the novel, but would wager that it makes more sense than the film does, with its Gothic excrescences and nonsensical central figure...

...Since it is a near-nonspeaking role, much of it wedged into a wheelchair, everything depends on facial play...