MENTORING THE WILD BOYS
An ancient Athenian guide to the life and work of François Truffaut

by Sam Hall

 

 

Queer readings of François Truffaut's films have generally had to content themselves with a few daring looks-askance at his quirky ménage à trois, Jules and Jim (1962). We're encouraged to nod knowingly at how close together Jules and Jim's shower cubicles are after a gym workout. And one has to marvel at how the "unambiguous queer subtext" leads to "codifications...that effectuate the queering of private spaces."^[1] It's all harmless enough, and at least does Truffaut the courtesy of leaving his films untouched.

Queerness as a radical and revelatory critical tool keeps itself, of course, bracingly free of any pederastic taint, so it misses the more interesting observation that Truffaut's body of work has two main interests: women and boys. Like so much in the creative life of this driven, paradoxical man—immaculately buttoned-up and burning with passion—it has a rather old-fashioned ring to it. Cinematic tradition was for Truffaut both a lifeline and creative source for his New Wave, future-shaping career.

Truffaut's affection for children, and activism on their behalf, has always been foregrounded. What is never acknowledged, though, is the fact that his child-centred films always focus on boys around eleven to thirteen years of age. His first feature film, the New Wave earthquake The 400 Blows, is a stunning portrait of an early adolescent boy, one that involved a dizzyingly complex personal and artistic relationship between 27-year-old director Truffaut and 14-year-old star and acolyte Jean-Pierre Léaud. Both were open about the love they shared, the relationship continuing until Truffaut's early death at 52, whereupon Léaud was devastated.

Four years after Truffaut's death, fellow New-Waver Jean-Luc Godard penned a short foreword to a collection of Truffaut's letters. Godard and Truffaut had started out brothers-in-arms and had fallen out as their career paths and politics diverged. In the foreword, Godard takes a tone of melancholic reminiscence: "Why did I quarrel with François?...Something stupid. Infantile." But he included a curious memory of Truffaut's triumphant storming of Cannes with The 400 Blows:

Along the Croisette, bombarded with cheers, there came a strange trio: an elderly eagle whose broad-spanned wings were already greying [Jean Cocteau], a young ruffian [Truffaut], awkward and pale, risen from the depths of a book by Jean Genet or Maurice Sachs and now holding the hand of an even younger boy [Jean-Pierre Léaud] who was to become the French equivalent of Pasolini’s Ninetto.^[2]

Is this a sly dig from Truffaut's old sparring partner? Or is it a genuine, broad-minded tribute? One thing we can confidently state with Godard: it wasn't naïve. The two authors Godard's fancy ropes in are notable homosexuals (why not Truffaut's greatest literary love, Balzac, so important to the film?). And Ninetto is Giovanni Davoli, who as a 15-year-old boy began a pederastic affair with 41-year-old Pier Paolo Pasolini, one which resulted in an ongoing relationship and saw Ninetto star in several of the director's films. It's a good fit for Truffaut and Léaud—except for the small matter of sex. There was no sex in Truffaut and Léaud's relationship. In fact, there's good evidence that Truffaut was fastidiously one-hundred-percent heterosexual. He had a well-known phobia about being touched by men, and had a distinct preference for female-only company after sundown. This extreme form of heterosexuality was seen by Freud as unnatural—"Exclusive sexual interest in women is also a problem that needs elucidation"—and when paired with Truffaut's intense emotional bonding with the older André Bazin and younger Léaud, presents an interesting psychological dynamic.

An ancient Athenian might, with a sizeable grain of salt, have believed Truffaut and Léaud's love to have been chaste. But they would not have believed Truffaut experienced no sexual attraction—not even arch-prude Plato would go that far. Certainly not when the affair involved a boy with Jean-Pierre's looks and charisma. It would be like suggesting Romeo had only wanted to climb through Juliet's window to play checkers. But Truffaut experienced no sexual attraction to boys in general or Léaud in particular. Given history's unarguable contention that pederasty is a naturally occurring part of male sexuality, this requires an explanation. Obviously our modern culture's fierce suppression of pederastic sexuality is important, perhaps decisive. But Truffaut, although quite conservative in a lot of ways, was stubbornly aligned with society's outsiders, and he deplored the loveless world he and his avatar Antoine Doinel grew up in. Still in his youth, Truffaut had close friendships with homosexual men like Jean Cocteau and the pederastic Jean Genet. He was a huge fan of André Gide, so was familiar with Corydon's defence of pederasty and separation of it from the nascent gay-lib movement, something Truffaut had little time for. The lack of any sexual feelings in Truffaut's love for Léaud comes, I think, from a more important source, the psychosexual dynamic at the root of his art.

Truffaut lived in a world devoid of pederastic normalcy and was vigorously heterosexual. As with his American protégé Woody Allen, Truffaut's sex life was up there on the screen for our inspection. As Léaud matured he gave us, via the five Antoine Doinel films, many cinematic glimpses at his mentor's bedroom secrets. Truffaut had passionate affairs with several of his leading ladies, and forlornly longed for one or two which didn't eventuate. As a critic, Truffaut wrote in 1958:

Cinema is an art of the woman, that is, of the actress. The director’s work consists in getting pretty women to do pretty things. For me, the great moments of cinema are when the director’s gifts mesh with the gifts of an actress...^[3]

Perhaps it's unsurprising that his two films centred on a boy's life—The 400 Blows and The Wild Child—focus on adolescents who are estranged, cut off, lonely. The pretty women are out of reach and men are at best neglectful. This was Truffaut's experience from the age of ten to sixteen, when he had the life-altering luck to meet André  Bazin, a respected film critic who became the boy's saviour and mentor. Bazin twice got Truffaut out of detention—juvenile at sixteen, military at eighteen—and after taking him into his home, set him to work writing professional film reviews. From there, the rest was visual splendour.

Truffaut never stinted in his praise of Bazin—of Bazin the knowledgeable film critic, but, more importantly, of Bazin the man. Truffaut divided his life into Before and After Bazin. Bazin gave the troubled, increasingly delinquent Truffaut a concrete ideal to aim for, a character and life-purpose worth trying to emulate. Truffaut freely admitted owing his artistic life to Bazin. And this craving for mentorship was to underpin Truffaut's entire career. Hitchcock, Renoir, Rossellini—Truffaut held his chosen masters in undisguised reverence.

For Truffaut, cinema as "an art of the woman" required some foundational male-bonding of impressive depth and intensity. Drawing on tradition was deeply instinctual for Truffaut and not restricted to film craft. When he came to make his first feature, The 400 Blows, the role of loving mentorship, overtly absent from the film, took on mythological, frankly spooky, dimensions. After the first day's filming, the moment celluloid began recording the fruits of Truffaut's strengthening bond with Léaud, André Bazin died of leukaemia. Bazin was known by all as a man of great compassion, intelligence and generosity. His departure from life's stage couldn't have been better directed in terms of the bigger project, art. The film was dedicated to Bazin and the loving mentorship between Truffaut and Léaud went on to replicate Bazin's with Truffaut. Getting the troubled teen Léaud into stable housing, dragging him back when he wandered, setting him on a lifelong artistic career, became an ongoing concern for Truffaut.

In the early sixties, Jean-Pierre Léaud was asked in an interview about working with Truffaut for a second time, starring in Antoine and Colette (1962), the second Doinel film. Léaud said "the most exhilarating and most fantastic moments of my life were when I filmed with him. Truly." The interviewer then asked about the noted phenomenon that Léaud in this second film, shot three years after The 400 Blows, was starting to look a bit like Truffaut. The young Léaud replied simply, "We look like the people we love."^[4] The now more earnest and guarded young man even managed a tentative smile. Actors working on the set of The 400 Blows observed the relationship between Truffaut and Léaud to be an intimate father-son type affair, the two always wandering off together deep in conversation. After the day's filming, Truffaut would take Léaud to all-night bull sessions, talking film with Godard, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, Jean Eustache, and Orson Welles. The exhilarating effect of all this on a fractious fourteen-year-old boy was, unsurprisingly, life-changing.

The cinema was for Truffaut, from earliest adolescence, always a sacred female womb-space. It was his refuge and the place where he discovered his love of beautiful women and film. I would suggest that in the loving-mentor relationship between Truffaut and Léaud, the hot alchemic crucible of art provided the alternative to sex. Sex is nature's more prosaic magic ingredient for creating such Athens-worthy man-boy affairs. As Plato described in Phaidros, the Truffaut-Léaud sublimation is rarefied and for the few, but when it works it is a powerful generator of good. Perhaps it was this that Godard was enigmatically referring to with his comment about Pasolini and Ninetto. 

It's important to note that this took place before the sexual revolution. In its aftermath, today's jaded and increasingly sex-phobic society, a similarly sublimated man-boy affair would be untenable. In a hostilely inverted way, we've arrived back at ancient Athens: Truffaut and Léaud, like Sokrates and Alkibiades, would be assumed by observers to be far too close to be chaste. The result of that belief would likely be rather un-Athenian. At the very least, parents, social workers, police, NGOs, and other assorted mobs, would move swiftly to separate the two to a safe distance. For Léaud, back into a cocoon of isolated, troubled delinquency. We have a plethora of institutions to deal with that.

Fortunately, art sails transcendently free of such time-bound social inanities. The 400 Blows remains untouchable as a sublime portrait of an early adolescent boy. Our hero, the thirteen-year-old Antoine Doinel, is based on Truffaut at that age. But as the director pointed out, Doinel's character and actions altered during filming as the charismatic Léaud brought his own influence and backstory to the role. Swap philosophy for film and what we have in Antoine Doinel is a shining example of Plato's intellectual man-boy birth, the civilisationally superior alternative to man-woman procreation.

The film's opening shots playfully but melancholically references the ancient tradition of loving mentorship. Behind the titles, we see, at a distance, the Eiffel Tower. The camera is moving briskly along at street level, as Antoine will soon do, so the tower is glimpsed only partially and briefly, often obscured by grey faceless buildings. The camera appears to be circling the desired artefact, never able to find a direct approach. In one shot, the sun is seen beside the spire, pale and weak, almost blotted out by grey cloud. Apollo won't be smiling on our young hero in this film.

Colin Crisp says, "the distant Eiffel Tower...is so insistently present that it comes to seem almost phallic."^[5] Truffaut had something of an obsession with the Eiffel Tower, collecting many models of it. So it's worth considering the phallic symbol's traditional meaning, long predating its use today as a glib punchline. Thorkil Vanggaard wrote a book on the subject, Phallós, where he explains that originally the phallus, the man's erect penis, was the phallic symbol, and things like the Eiffel Tower are representations of this symbol. He writes:

...for the boy, the phallus represents the grown man’s greatness, strength, independence, courage, wisdom, knowledge, mastery of other men and possession of desirable women, potency—and everything else a boy may look up to in men and desire for himself.^[6]

For the ancient Dorians Vanggaard was writing about, the act of pedication was a literal transference of a man's best qualities, contained in his semen, to the boy. By the time we reach classical Athens, this belief has become more pragmatic: sex creates an intimate bond which allows mentorship to pass on the desired qualities. A complete lack of loving mentorship, either sexual or sublimated, is the central theme of The 400 Blows. It's not far into the film before the irritable English teacher keeps repeating a question to a hapless student: "Where is the father?" The student, René Bigey, Antoine's best friend, can't even speak the question let alone answer it.

Toward the end of the opening sequence, the camera suddenly breaks through to reach the mighty Eiffel Tower. But it turns out to be a hollow sham. From the boy's perspective, we see a cold, abstract modernist construction, offering not even basic shelter or warmth. So we finish with Antoine-as-camera withdrawing rapidly down a tree-lined promenade, taking us away from this first blow to the 399 still waiting. It's at this moment that the dedication to André  Bazin fills the screen. He is the ghost that haunts this entire film, finally freezing its last frame with Antoine's questioning look crossing the fourth wall boundary to look straight at us.

We're introduced to Antoine Doinel in a boys' classroom. A picture of a calendar pinup girl is being surreptitiously passed around. When it reaches Antoine, he takes time to draw, à la Marcel Duchamp, a moustache on the scantily-clad woman. Truffaut's intimately autobiographical films are always nattering with each other. This shot links directly from Truffaut's first significant effort as director, the short film The Mischief Makers (1957). In this film, five similarly-aged boys trail after a beautiful young woman, Bernadette, trying to spy on her making out with her boyfriend. The boys are an unruly pack, without any hint of male guidance, and their response to the young woman's sexual allure is ambivalent. The voice-over tells us: "A virginal heartbeat has its own juvenile logic. Too young to love Bernadette, we decided to hate and torment her." They harass the couple with hooting and sudden frights, and scrawl derisive graffiti in public places. So Antoine is a distillation of The Mischief Makers' undifferentiated boy-pack, and could likewise do with some manly guidance. Instead he gets the second blow. "Sourpuss", the grumpy teacher, catches Antoine with the calendar and sends him to stand in the corner. The boy's response: more graffiti. On the wall he pens some ad hoc verse memorialising the event:

Here poor Antoine Doinel was unfairly punished
by Sourpuss, for a pin-up that fell from the sky.
It will be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

"A pin-up that fell from the sky" is good. But it only brings further punishment. It's plain from the get-go: Antoine is a mischievous kid with an attractive creative spark. Over the course of the film, the punishment of Antoine's misdeeds is not the issue—he does lie and steal—but the relentless irritable indifference to his obvious good qualities does deserve condemnation. This was in fact Truffaut's constantly repeated refrain when on his child-welfare soapbox. Children need to be seen. Or, taking his film oeuvre's point-of-view: boys entering adolescence badly need to be seen. In Truffaut's first two films, the mischief of boys is a cry for engagement. It takes a deal of modern din to block it out.

The calendar girl also begins an important theme running through the first half of the movie: Antoine's awakening sexuality. After Sourpuss's culminating denunciation of the entire class's ill-mannered idiocy, we enter Antoine's home. It's a little, little home, consisting of three tiny rooms—don't blink or you'll bump into something. Speaking of Duchamp, the apartment is almost Dada-esque, a nightmare armpit miniature of a nuclear family setting.

After school, Antoine has the place to himself and goes about his normal routine. While we wonder where exactly Mom and Dad are supposed to fit, he gets the briquette heater going and nicks some money. Then he wanders into the parental bedroom and sits at his mother's dressing table. Curious, amused, he checks out the feminine implements, sniffs bottled perfume, brushes his hair. Watching himself in the mirror with a small smile, he tries out the eyelash-curler on himself. It's a sweetly rendered scene showing the sexual ambiguity of male adolescence, one moment honking bawdily at pinup girls, the next feeling a strange thrill at slipping into feminine accoutrements. It's the phase traditionally defined as the boy still being more desirable than desiring. As we will see, Truffaut uses this scene as the starting point for three later films.

Next, Mom arrives home. We see a seamless continuation of the Sourpuss's bad temper—"Get my slippers!"—but this time in the guise of a domineering, beautiful woman. Just inside the front door, in the tiny entrance alcove, she sits on a bench and begins taking her stockings off. We soon learn this is in fact Antoine's bed, but her leggy display is entirely heedless of her thirteen-year-old son's presence.

This scene burns deep with Truffautian biography. He was ten when he moved from his grandmother's care to live for the first time with his natural mother and step-father. In their little, little apartment. Truffaut was badly conflicted by his feelings for a woman he found attractive, commanding, but derisive of his presence. Intellectually he knew she was his mother but, having only just met her, his awakening sexuality responded as if she was an unrelated beautiful woman. As a person, his mother was impossible to love, leaving only his guilt-ridden sexual response. And Janine Truffaut thought so little of her son's autonomy or agency, her state of dress in his presence was, for her, a non-issue. Antoine's reverie at his mother's dressing table takes on increased significance. The pubescent boy's sexual impulses, directed at his mother, represents a threat of re-merging with the source of life, a total annihilation of separate identity. A useful strategy here would be for the boy to go gay. But it's too late for that in Antoine-Truffaut's case. Hence Truffaut's artistic death-obsession regarding sex.

Truffaut freely acknowledged his restless pursuit of women, his inability to settle down, was tied to this pubescent Freudian knot. By thirteen, his best friend reports Truffaut was already girl-crazy. In so many of his films, sexual love wreaks havoc, shredding society's frail barriers, usually resulting in death or insanity. Men are killed for infidelity, for loving too much or not enough, for ogling a woman's lovely legs. Women don't come off much better, copping a bullet or being blasted into madness by what Truffaut call's cinema's one true subject: love. And painfully conflicted mother-love stands behind it all, telling naughty François to get Mommy's slippers.

Commentators have often observed that Antoine overreacts in The 400 Blows. One infraction and he's out the door, running away, life as he knew it finished. A bit melodramatic, son. Well, he is adolescent, but it was never about the surface level misdemeanours. The boy desperately needed some breathing space, to put some distance between himself and his mother. All the running away Antoine did was in fact an instinctual running toward the missing male group, the traditional place for pubescent boys to mature. Trapped in his mother's sexual force-field, Antoine needed it more than most. As I said, the ghost of André Bazin haunts every scene of this film. In ancient Crete, Bazin would have kidnapped Truffaut and taken him off to a secluded cinema to love and guide him. In The 400 Blows, the male group is a hollowed-out bureaucratic institution. At the Juvenile Detention Centre, the guards blow whistles, give orders, and remain coldly distant. The one interaction Antoine had with a man came when he was struck across the face for eating his bread before the dinner bell.

Without the Westermarck effect, the natural development of incest aversion which begins in infancy, Antoine—and Truffaut—were put under painful sexual stress in their dogbox boyhoods. At an already difficult time, they were tortured by sexual impulses rendered unruly and unacceptable by circumstance. When Antoine finally does escape and reaches the beach, his boyhood dream, what does he find? A dull, grey, unwelcoming, coldly lapping sea. Our original mother. Welcome home, son. Is it any wonder his turn and glance into the camera is a little perplexed? To drive the point home, the scene following Antoine's mother arriving home puts the boy in a queue waiting to buy some flour. He ends up standing behind two women blithely discussing the horrors of normal, everyday childbirth: "forceps," "surgery," "there was blood everywhere." Antoine's near throwing-up couldn't have been funnier or clearer: get this boy to a male lodge, stat!

Ostensibly, by far the most positive adult male in Antoine's life—in fact the only one—is his step-father. Julien Doinel, early on, gets along well with his step-son. He's a man with a joking-around approach to life, and Antoine enjoys time spent with him. The fact Julien is prone to occasional outbursts of anger isn't a problem—Antoine did steal his precious Michelin Guide. What is a problem is that Julien's bond with Antoine is provisional. Antoine happens to be living under his roof, and there's no reason for Julien not to enjoy a laugh with him. At the same time, in front of Antoine, he'll happily discuss with the boy's mother, Gilberte, where they can offload him for the summer holidays. Antoine is never included in Julien and Gilberte's weekends away. It's a relationship of convenience. Julien is loyal only to his temperamental, unfaithful wife, and he betrays Antoine's confidence at a time the boy was at his lowest ebb in prison. So the best man in Antoine's life turns out to be, when it counts, the biggest disappointment.

The morning of our second day with Antoine begins with him rushing to the bathroom mirror. (The bathroom in this minimalist nightmare is a shower attachment and basin stuck to the side of the tiny kitchen.) A strange moment ensues. Antoine wipes the mist from the mirror as the sinister voice of Sourpuss the teacher sounds spookily in his mind: "I must not deface the classroom walls..." Writing this out in various grammatical variations was his punishment for the graffiti. Writing, then, is of great importance. Antoine stares into the mirror, seemingly hypnotised. It's a reference to the boy's missing mentor—instead of André Bazin, the ghost of mentoring-future, Antoine is struck dumb by the hell-sprung Sourpuss. Then the scene's charge heightens further as we hear ominous footsteps approach. Antoine sees in the mirror his step-father enter the room. It's a curiously pregnant moment. One has the expectation something significant is about to happen. But the moment quickly dissolves as Julien starts talking to Gilberte about the holes in his socks. And the boy doesn't waste any time getting out into the wide open streets.

Outside, Antoine meets up with his best friend René who easily convinces him to play hooky. And so begins one of the film's exhilarating freedom sequences. Out of the cramped, libido-stunting dogboxes of home and school, the two boys are in their element, roaming the streets, giving lip to motorists, taking in a movie, playing the pinnies, going to a fun fair. Antoine is a boy to fall in love with, not to be pitied. His capacity for creative adventure is undimmed by a dull world determined to ignore it. The constantly galling thing is that his ready-to-roll brio lies so damnedly fallow.

Patrick Auffay was an interesting choice to play Antoine's best friend. René Bigey is based on Truffaut's childhood friend Robert Lachenay, but the film friendship is markedly different. Truffaut and Lachenay met at school when Truffaut was eleven and Lachenay, two years older, was very much the leader of the two. Directing the autobiographical film, Truffaut quickly realised this dynamic wouldn't work with Léaud playing Antoine. Léaud brought too much self-possession and bullocky energy to the role. So Auffay's performance seems more like a helpmeet to the film's primary aim: a singular portrait of Antoine Doinel. But he acquits himself well and deserved another call-up in Antoine and Colette.

In the dvd commentary of The 400 Blows, Robert Lachenay describes his first meeting Truffaut as "love at first sight". They bonded over literature, film and truancy. Sleepovers at Lachenay's gloriously big old house, presided over by distant parents, were common. They were close enough to cop accusations of homosexuality. It's hard to think of a phenomenon less relevant to anything than two early adolescent boys maybe indulging in sex-play. What's more interesting is the fact that a primary accuser was Truffaut's mother. Apparently Mom's irritable impatience with her son's existence included an expectation of befuddled sexual loyalty. Janine Truffaut was always a strong-willed woman, ahead of her time.

The 400 Blows first freedom sequence culminates in Antoine going on a rotor ride at a fun fair. René remains in the circle of spectators above. And Truffaut chose this moment to make a Hitchcockian appearance in his own film. He's one of the three adults who also take up a spot inside the large circular drum. It's part of the boys' day of fun but it becomes another uncanny moment. As the drum gains speed, pinning the participants to the wall, the floor dropping away, the machine's noise builds to a rhythmic roar and the spectators become a mashed blur. We see Antoine laughing and loving it, but also grimacing as he tries with all his might to move his body around. The centripetal forces keep him trapped in place. It's both an exaggeration of Antoine's social predicament, pinned like a bug by impersonal forces, and also a descent into Dionysian experience. The ring of individual spectators are blended into porridge. Gravity goes skew-whiff. Vertical and horizontal playfully invert. The pounding roar of the machine deafens and is shot through with uncanny shrieks from god knows where. And the initiates are trapped in bodies made absolute and non-negotiable. Will and I think therefore I am disappear like confetti in a hurricane. The initiates give themselves up to the thrilling experience of total immersion: body and brute force are one and all. Antoine alone fights for autonomy, strenuously writhing and contorting on the wall. He takes a painful blow to the head and keeps going. Disturbingly, he only succeeds in contorting himself into a helpless foetal position. There was only ever going to be one winner. As the ride slows to a gentle stop, all participants, including Antoine, find themselves exactly where they started. Only their staggering about like drunken sailors hint at the insight gained: enjoy the ride, folks, kick your heels up even, but just remember: you ain't going nowhere. Born, live, and die in the body. The dizzying whirligig obviously worked for Truffaut. As he exits stage-left, bidding his boy adieu, he lights up a cigarette.

In typical Truffaut fashion, the scene is in dialogue with films not yet made. Ten years later, Truffaut will again accompany a boy lost in the chaos of nature, when he stars as Jean Itard in The Wild Child. But in that film, rather than leave his young charge to get by as best he can, he'll take on the role of loving mentor and produce a rare happy ending. It's an old and fairly simple truth: boys don't become men without male guidance. Look again at cinema's most famous final freeze-frame, the boy's quizzical glance at us from the margin of nature's original rotor: Eh? wtf, guys, it's not rocket science.

After the giddy fun of the rotor, the boys' day of freedom comes to a sudden halt. Walking down the street, Antoine sees his mother kissing another man. Mother and son make eye-contact, both reeling with shock. It throws Antoine into confusion and he rushes off. That night he forges an excuse note to take to school next day. Trying to imitate his mother's handwriting, he gets his own name wrong. This leads to him having no written note when confronted by Sourpuss the next morning. Sourpuss is at his hectoring best, demanding an explanation for yesterday's absence. Antoine, desperate, suddenly blurts that his mother has died. It works a treat, gains him some rare Sourpuss sympathy, but sinks him deep in confused guilt.

Given the amount of love-prompted death in Truffaut's films, it's no surprise he thought Antoine's ejaculation "She's dead!" to be of supreme importance. He spoke at some length about it in interviews. Truffaut says the scene "in which the child says that his mother 'is dead' is very personal. I had a deep sense of how it should be acted, and I was confident that I would not screw it up." Director and actor are becoming one here. Art performs the blending duties of the rotor. In the same interview, four years after the film's making, he went on to compulsively replay the scene, speaking both parts. This one small line—"She's dead!"—is a keyhole moment where we get to see the shamanic director at work. The loving-mentor bond between man and boy has enabled a rapturous moment of union. Truffaut went on:

I don’t think that I have directed anyone with as much precision as I did Jean-Pierre in this scene, owing to the fact that I knew exactly what I wanted. I even told him to think, “That’s going to annoy you, eh!” when he was saying it, and to keep it in his head.^[7]

This is why Truffaut didn't direct girls. In Small Change he gives a reasonably long scene to a girl and it's a rather stilted performance, not imbued with the naturalness and spontaneity he regularly achieved with boys. Truffaut's female-focussed films show love as a fraught arena of death-haunted sex. With boys, Truffaut, buttressed by society, can successfully repress the sex instinct he was powerless to stop with his mother. Love wins conditional freedom. It's a victory celebrated in the cry, "She's dead!" Both forms of love are unrealistic and unbalanced but, in the temenos of art, they scintillate. In The 400 Blows' mother-killing scene, Truffaut played Hermes to his brave young Perseus, giving the boy the weapons and wit to complete his manly task. Together, in fact, Truffaut and Léaud become Perseus, killing the Medusan mother and, like the mythological hero, winning immortal fame.

At a more prosaic level, the director-actor mechanics behind this scene also exemplify the original pederastic tradition. Dialogue, action, and motivation—a film's essence—are transferred from man to boy. With the pederasty practiced by ancient Dorians, we found "erotic pleasure subordinated to a more important aim" of turning boys into men. The Truffaut-Léaud relationship in the filming of The 400 Blows involves a similar dynamic, only subordination has been replaced by sublimation. Art practiced at a high level enables such shamanic alchemy. Ironically, this man-boy magic has been used in The 400 Blows to show that, in ordinary life, a complete removal of traditional man-boy relations results not in sublimation but desertification.

Antoine's shocking lie is soon exposed, the boy publicly slapped by his angry step-father. And, following the logic of this mongrel maturation ritual, Antoine decides he must leave home and make his own way. He spends the night roaming the streets of Paris alone, and soon meets with a chance for human connection. Jeanne Moreau, soon to be Truffaut's first leading-lady muse, briefly appears on the street as "Woman looking for her dog." Our young hero eagerly offers to help the maiden in distress, but is quickly bullied out of contention by a young man who is similarly keen to help. Women are still out of reach; men nothing but brutish competitors. Back on the original Darwinian savanna, pederasty evolved to give such adolescent lads a way of staying in the survival game.

There follows an extended sequence of Antoine stealing a bottle of milk and furtively scarfing it down. Mother's milk, runs the standard interpretation—stealing the essential nurturance he doesn't get at home. Nice bourgeois try, but no cigar—Antoine has cut his ties with the mother. Looking for a male world that doesn't exist, intuiting the film's ghost of loving mentorship, I would suggest the milk is of a far more seminal significance.

Before leaving home, Antoine left a note for his parents which Julien reads aloud to Gilberte:

Dear Mother and Dad. I understand how wrong it was to lie. We can't go on living together. Therefore I'll try my luck alone in Paris or elsewhere. I'll prove I can become a man. One day I'll come back and we'll discuss all that's happened. Love Antoine.

We are again struck by this supposed delinquent's feel for the written word. The note is a neat encapsulation of the boy's character and station in life. The important kernel, "I'll prove I can become a man," is buried between two rather mischievous jabs. "Mother and Dad," rather than "Mom and Dad," comes while Gilberte is still fuming at her son's lie about her being dead. She snaps at Julien, "Why kill me off instead of you?" Indeed. An important Freudian question. Julien's only comment is to note a spelling mistake. But the final sentence, threatening to "discuss all that's happened" is a political masterstroke. Gilberte's anger is really at the tables having been turned. Her maturing son, witness to her infidelity, is now in possession of sexual knowledge that could hurt her, indeed kill her social position.

And it works a treat. The next day at school, Antoine is again called out of class. He's clearly expecting hellfire. But in the principal's office, Gilberte smothers her son with love and kisses—thank God he's safe! We then embark on an extraordinary sequence where Gilberte displays her impressive feminine wiles. She jokes, flirts and fluffs the boy. At home, she bathes him, rubs him dry with a big fluffy towel and, after a big kiss on the tummy, tumbles him nude into the parental bed. Time for a chat and the sharing of secrets, just between us, son! She soon asks her clumsily transparent question: What, by the way, did you mean by writing "we'll discuss all that's happened"? Antoine bats the question away blithely, betraying only the tiniest hint of enjoying a little knife-twist. Commentary on The 400 Blows often speaks of ambiguity in this mother-love sequence. Perhaps, the theory goes, some genuine maternal instinct arose in Gilberte after Antoine ran away. I would say this view is a testament to the hypnotic power of the mother rather than a plausible reading of what occurs. With this one, I'll stick with Antoine's more canny take on the situation.

It's during this sequence we can begin to properly appreciate the quality of Jean-Pierre Léaud's acting. In the outdoor scenes, he shows an attractively ebullient boy, nobody's fool but with a beguiling innocence still informing his love of adventure. Taking his dreary-as-clockwork blows at school and home, he shows a quietly impressive constancy, an unsentimental fortitude with an adolescent dash of whatever, man. His ability to imply an eye-roll without quite doing it is sublime. Often the blows he receives are deserved, but that is beside the point. The adults in his world are unmoved by his obvious talent and will-to-engage, but the audience sure isn't. An instruction Truffaut had to keep impressing on Léaud was not to smile, the boy's natural instinct and one that made him the media's darling at Cannes. It was astute direction, because the lack of that smile, another ghost haunting the film, adds emotional depth and heft.

We soon reach the film's hinge, the midpoint, and an explicit statement of our central theme. After school, reclining on his little bench-bed, smoking a cigarette, Antoine is lost in Balzac's novel The Quest of the Absolute. A voice-over gives us Antoine reading the words as he wafts his smoking cigarette like a censer. But it's not Antoine's voice. It's the voice of a man, and we find out who it is soon enough. Above Antoine's bed a rude wooden box is stuck to the wall. With the interior curtained off, it's the boy's one morsel of privacy. After the final words are sonorously intoned—"He raised his hand in anger and shouted Archimedes' famous last words: 'Eureka! I have found it.'"—Antoine pins up a photograph of Balzac in his curtained private space. This is the film's second pin-up, the first, a scantily-clad woman, a source of excitable hijinks, this one more seriously reverent. Balzac the mentor, a living ghost and a titan of a man, inspirits Antoine and is the obvious source of his nascent wordsmithery.

But in Antoine's world, to invoke the loving-mentor is to invite disaster. The following day Sourpuss assigns the class an essay: "Describe a serious event you witnessed that involved you personally." Antoine is immediately gripped by his literary hero and a voice-over gives us his Balzacian thoughts: "Eureka! I have found it." Except, this time, the voice-over is Antoine's own. And the boy eagerly writes a title for his composition: "My Grandfather's Death." The magic of man-boy transmission, dating back to the ancient cultic practice. The very next scene confirms this, showing Antoine lighting a candle to place before Balzac in his shrine.

But a boy jimmy-rigging his own loving-mentorship is dangerous—this magic is potent, requires tradition, guidance, and ritual to contain it. The candle sets the curtain on fire and almost burns the apartment down. The next day, Sourpuss denounces Antoine for plagiarism, reading out the transmitted Balzacian phrase with sarcastic ridicule. The miserable teacher overreacts furiously by kicking Antoine out and suspending him for the rest of term. It's likely Sourpuss's preposterous, sadistic overreaction was triggered by guilt, sensing the surreptitious mentoring that has no place in a bureaucratically regimented world.

The one silver lining is that best-friend René loyally gets himself kicked out as well. This moment marks the transition of Antoine from the female to the male realm. Neither has much to recommend it. Antoine doesn't see his mother again until she pays her son a brief visit in juvenile detention. With barely restrained glee, she informs Antoine that she and Julien will have nothing more to do with him. She wins, in other words. Whatever maternal instincts Gilberte may have had always belonged to the dark side of the Great Mother.

Antoine goes home with René where he's staggered by the size of the place. So much space! Parents are there somewhere, but distant and preoccupied. Walking into René's room, Antoine's face lights up with joy at the sight of a large stuffed horse. We soon find out its name is Bucephalus. Alexander the Great won his mighty steed at Antoine's age, and Léaud would certainly have deserved consideration for the role of a young Alexander. Antoine pats the horse as the boys discuss financing their planned adventure of fleeing to the beach and buying a boat, creating an empire of their own.

But the dreams of boys need manly moulds and guidance to amount to much. Antoine's move into the male realm tracks a steady downward descent. It's a grim, unwelcoming world. Is it any wonder boys today accept servitude in an endlessly prolonged, stifling, female school system. Antoine's interactions with men come thick and fast, all bearing the now-familiar stamp of cold indifference or impatient hostility. He's arrested for stealing a typewriter, turned in by a step-father uninterested in any complicated needs the boy might have. He is, after all, still searching for his Michelin Guide.

This leads to Antoine's trip in a prison van. He sits at the back, holding the bars of the window, watching his home neighbourhood recede. Traditionally, kidnapping a boy, taking him from women's to men's quarters, is a scary but exhilarating start of the great boy-to-man adventure. It's not supposed to be the start of a grinding process of unrelenting indifference. Truffaut keeps his camera on the boy's face behind the bars for an extended time. Antoine's quiet stoicism is present, but saddened, a first hint of helplessness creeping in, and we see tears streaking his cheeks. It's powerful for its understatement, a shot that turns up again with similar effect, twice, in The Wild Child. Truffaut doesn't have his boys, in times of emotional crisis, demonstrably cry. Bedewing such lively, attractive lads, the tears seem almost miraculous, something only seen once a century on a rocky outcrop shaped like the Madonna. As the prison van rattles along, Truffaut takes us in closer and closer, won't let us look away. Cut again to the final freeze-frame and Truffaut's insistence: the boy must be seen. The van turns slightly and the light hits Antoine's face at a new angle. The image becomes blatantly religious: his liquid eyes and silvery tear-streaks dazzle with gem-like brightness, a sublime black-and-white iconography. His heartbreaking beauty is shot in exactly the same way the beautiful Hollywood actress achieves her immortal Mr DeMille moment.

At the Observation Centre for Delinquent Youth, it's more of the same. Once again, our redoubtable hero gets on with life, finds friends, breaks rules, takes his blows ungrumblingly. But he also manages to scrounge a scrap of mentorship. An older boy is returned to the prison after a brief escape. Antoine, with some other boys, visits him in solitary confinement and listens to the unrepentant youth declare it was worth it, he lived it up for five days, and he'll do it again as soon as he gets a chance.

But before the great escape, we have the scene Truffaut called the film's most important: the interview with the psychologist. The final freeze-frame would be nothing but a cute trick without this unexpected, startlingly intimate meet-and-greet. Despite the flat, disembodied voice of the psychologist, it's a vivid demonstration of what's missing in the boy's life: real engagement with the adult world. Truffaut always insisted his adolescence was miserable, pre-Bazin, not because of mistreatment but because of no-treatment.

For this scene, to achieve spontaneity and intimacy, cast and crew were banished and only a cameraman remained in the room with Truffaut and Léaud. Without scripting, Truffaut asked the questions and Léaud was free to answer in character as he saw fit. It's another moment where the man-boy creation of Antoine Doinel becomes a spectacular achievement of art-life alchemy. The tentatively opening bud of Antoine's personality makes one pine for the movie where he tumbles enthusiastically through life as one of the King's Boys in the court of Alexander. Truffaut's final question, "Have you slept with a girl?" was unexpected, and the surprised glance Léaud throws Truffaut, followed by cheeky secret smile, was the sublime fourth-wall rupture that sets us up for the later immortal freeze-frame.

The shamanic shenanigans continued in post-production, Truffaut's off-screen role being masked by a woman's voice. His appearance in the Rotor earlier was a blind. Here in the intimate seclusion of the psychologist's office was his most important, if invisible, appearance in the film. When Truffaut was locked up in juvenile detention, at sixteen years of age, he wrote to Bazin for help. Bazin worked with the institution's psychologist, a woman who had sympathy for the boy's plight, and got Truffaut out. Truffaut now slips into the role of the woman to honour her importance. It's another hint of his gender-crossing experiments to come. It was after the psychologist's help that Bazin employed Truffaut as personal assistant and encouraged him to write film reviews, the start of Truffaut's artistic calling. Formative experiences like that are the mortar of Truffaut's work.

Finally we come to the end The 400 Blows and Antoine's great escape. His derring-do dash across sports field and under fence is followed by the boy's long solo run through the countryside. The tracking sequence becomes hypnotic. After the preceding introduction to Antoine's loveably boyish personality, we now see the strapping lad who needs to be amongst men. His strength, constancy, stamina, and above all his will are beyond his years. The proud spirit of Bucephalus is with him. The two scenes, psychologist and freedom-run, give us a diptych of the tumultuous adult-child mix that is adolescence. But only once Antoine has escaped society entirely can he express his adult capacity.

Once he reaches the desultory beach he slows to a more tentative canter. Making for the vast silent waters, the longed-for sea now seems to be pulling the strings. Is this a win for freedom? He reaches the gently undulating shallows and paddles speculatively—the temptation to merge, as at his mother's dressing table. This penultimate moment leads directly to the opening of Truffaut's other boy-film, The Wild Child, which opens with a similarly-aged lad, naked and nameless, fully absorbed into nature, sitting in the crook of a tree, comforting himself with the rock-a-bye motion of the ocean's wavelets. Antoine, though, refuses the invitation. He turns back and gives us his famous quizzical glance. Truffaut's adult-focused films, outside the Antoine Doinel cycle, usually end in death or ruin. Here, the freeze-frame refuses to let the story end. Suspended unbearably, it sends us back to the film's start in search of clues, to the elusive Eiffel Tower and the ghost of André Bazin. The unreadable ambiguity of Antoine's look is, from back here in ancient Athens, fairly straight forward: Come on guys, it's not rocket science.

In real life, Truffaut answered Jean-Pierre Léaud's Antoine appeal. Similar to Antoine and Truffaut, Léaud's adolescence was troubled and delinquency-bound. Truffaut was the primary motivator behind Léaud's celebrated artistic career. This loving-mentorship was formally celebrated ten years later in The Wild Child, where Truffaut stepped onscreen to play loving-mentor in a film dedicated to Léaud. In an interview after Truffaut's death, Léaud summed it up succinctly: "François is the man I most loved in the world, as he himself would say about André Bazin." Magical stuff indeed, still alive in the movies if not the world.

Truffaut went on to make four more Antoine Doinel films, all infused with the combined biographies of Truffaut and Léaud but subordinated to the life of the original man-boy creation. The succeeding films sprang from another questioning of the final freeze-frame. What if there was no loving-mentor in Antoine's life, as there was with Truffaut and Léaud? The boy's innate qualities see to his leading a respectable, if rather feckless and insubstantial, life. The most notable trait Antoine has, the source of the films' humour and eccentricity, is his eternal adolescence. The freeze-frame was prophetic. Antoine doesn't fully mature, can't get a serious job or relationship to stick. The impressive bullocky constancy of the boy has turned flighty and unpredictable. He's a charmer still, but lacks adult gravitas and centeredness.

Léaud went on to become an icon of the New Wave, appearing in many Jean-Luc Godard films. If one wants a demonstration of how the traditional man-boy relationship worked once the erotic boy-love phase concluded, read the opening of Truffaut's scarifying letter to Godard in 1973, Léaud now twenty-nine. The differences between Truffaut and Godard had been growing for some time, and a not insignificant part of this was caused by Truffaut's displeasure at Godard's treatment of Léaud:

I’m sending back to you the letter you wrote to Jean-Pierre Léaud: I read it and I think it’s obnoxious. And because of that letter I feel the time has come to tell you, at length, that in my opinion you’ve been acting like a shit.

As regards Jean-Pierre, who’s been so badly treated since the business with Marie and more recently in his work, I think it’s obnoxious of you to kick him when he’s down, obnoxious to extort money by intimidation from someone who is fifteen years younger than you are and whom you used to pay less than a million when he was the lead in films that were earning you thirty times as much.

Yes, Jean-Pierre has changed since Les 400 Coups, but I can tell you that it was in Masculin—Féminin that I noticed for the first time how he could be filled with anxiety rather than pleasure at the notion of finding himself in front of a camera. The film was good and he was good in the film, but that first scene, in the café, was a painful experience for anyone looking at him with affection and not with an entomologist’s eye.

I never expressed the slightest reservation about you to Jean-Pierre, who admired you so much, but I know that you were bad-mouthing me behind my back, in the way that a guy might say to a kid, ‘And your father, is he still pissed out of his mind?’^[8]

The men of ancient Athens would smile knowingly at such commonplace melodrama. With the melodrama's concomitant promotion of male excellence and achievement, it becomes timeless, leaving its mark in sculpture, poetry, art, and film. The letter also prompts another look at Godard's pederasty allusion in the preface cited earlier. Boy-love, competitor-hate: these things aren't interrupted by mere death. Antoine Doinel's freeze-frame is the most important boy-sculpture since the kouros statues of ancient Greece. Antoine seeks the elevation and acknowledgment achieved by these first free-standing sculptures. His creation was prompted by a similar boy-love. In Truffaut's cinema, boys might be ignored, might plummet to earth or remain suspended above it, but their beauty never dies.

* * *

After the world-conquering success of The 400 Blows, Truffaut moved quickly to make the most different film possible. Shoot the Piano Player (1960) is a crime drama done as playful New Wave genre mash-up. There is a small but important role for Richard Kanayan, a boy who had appeared the previous year in The 400 Blows. Kanayan caught Truffaut's eye in 400 Blows with his comic cameo in the classroom, trying to write down Sourpuss's recitation with a fountain pen spilling ink all over himself and his soon-shredded notebook. His similarly comic role in Piano Player is a quirkily upbeat answer to Antoine's question.

Kanayan's Fido is living with Charlie Koller (Charles Aznavour), his mid-thirties older brother, and is receiving the sort of engaged care Antoine lacked. Charlie's wife had earlier committed suicide and a bereft Charlie gave up his successful concert pianist career and withdrew from life, retaining only a survival-grade club-pianist gig. His personal life was reduced to a single dyad: he retrieved his young brother from his dodgy crime family and formed a mentoring relationship with him. Fido is about thirteen in the film, and we don't know how long he's been living with Charlie. However, Charlie had left home at fourteen, before Fido was born, so the post-death adoption was the start of their relationship.

From this station in life, Fido shows us a successful expression of the boyish ebullience ignored or punished in Antoine's case. Fido pulls successful, consequence-free pranks on the lurking gangsters, significantly dumping a bottle of milk on their car's windshield. Fido doesn't need to drink the milk, he's already flush with essential nurturance. The boy is seen leaving school for the day singing and skipping carefree down the street. The contrast with the grim 400 Blows classroom is deliberate and stark.

The gangsters soon manage to kidnap the boy, but this only leads to the film's most incongruous comedy, tilting into farce. The kidnapping is like a cross between ancient Cretan ritual and Abbott and Costello. Fido is seated in the car's front seat between the two gangsters, and the men start competing for the boy's attention, complimenting his milk trick, asking about school, giving him life advice, impressing him with gadgets, and making preposterous boasts to impress him. One such boast sees the gangster swearing on his mother's life that it's true. Via a bizarre silent-era insert, we see dear old mom drop dead. Truffaut was obviously still chortling over his Medusa-slaying moment with Léaud. Meanwhile, Fido happily engages with the gangsters, impressed or giving lip as he sees fit. The sequence ends with the car breaking down and the gangsters straining to push it to a garage as the boy, now behind the steering wheel, yells at them push harder. Ah yes, nod our ancient Athenian auditors, it was ever thus. The charioteer of my soul! Anakreon might have mused.

The film's climax takes place at an isolated snow-bound cabin where Charlie meets up with his two other brothers. They reminisce about Charlie's youth, how at fourteen-years-old the piano prodigy left home to live with his music mentor Zélény. Truffaut had written a paean to André Bazin, to be delivered by Charlie here, but it didn't make the final cut:

Charlie: You see, if it hadn't been for Zélény, I'd never have become a pianist; he's the only bloke that ever helped me; he was a father to me; he not only taught me to play the piano, he taught me to be a man. He was a remarkable fellow, and I owe him everything worthwhile that ever happened to me; to speak to him was like bathing in the Ganges, for a Hindu.^[9]

So Charlie's mentoring of Fido mirrors his experience with Zélény, which mirrors the real life triumvirate of Bazin-Truffaut-Léaud. A similar tribute makes it into The Wild Child with a Pinel-Itard-Victor tableaux before an actual mirror.

The primacy of the loving-mentorship informs Shoot the Piano Player's climax. The gangsters and Fido arrive at the cabin. As they make their way through the snow, Fido, tired of the men's company, shoves them aside and makes off on his own. In the following shootout , the gangsters fatally hit Léna, Charlie's romantic interest. As Léna's dead body slides gracefully down an icy incline, Charlie and Fido run to her, and towards each other, from opposite sides of the snowfield. We have here a depiction of Truffaut and Léaud's love. The snow freezes Léna, representing sex and death, allowing man and boy to come together in a moment of emotional intensity. They kneel, bend over the corpse, heads touching, overwhelmed. We go in for a close-up of Léna's face. It is reminiscent of The 400 Blows freeze-frame. But Léna's face is upside down and frozen not in life but death. Having slayed and iced the Medusan threat of dangerous sex, a purified Charlie will go home with his loved-boy. Only once in his life did Truffaut form a loving mentorship with a boy, and it was enabled by a defence strategy needing constant reinforcement. Always a trusty source of art. But once was enough, because, as the film's epilogue shows, a single transcendent man-boy connection can hold strong through the endless round of sex and death.

* * *

The two films which follow Jules and Jim—The Soft Skin (1964) and Fahrenheit 451 (1966)—feature small but significant boy moments. Fahrenheit 451 presents a dystopia where books are banned and firemen devoted to burning them. The people in this society are dumbing down, addicted to moronic TV shows and fast losing an interior life. What we have here is Antoine's bereft predicament taken to its logical conclusion. Antoine's one flicker of loving mentorship came via the books of Balzac. Now society's diligent tyranny seeks to exterminate even that. This is brought home powerfully in the final scene. The Book People are renegade rebels—outsiders are always Truffaut's brethren—who memorise one book each, take the book's title as their name, become the book, in order to transmit it to future generations. These people are the monks of the Dark Ages, devoted to the survival of art and knowledge. The final scene is one of hope. A dying man is reciting Robert Louis Stevenson's The Weir of Hermiston to a 12-year-old boy. And the man's protégé works to repeat and memorise the words. Antoine's supposed plagiarism of Balzac, the fruits of loving mentorship, is in fact civilisation's last chance.

Truffaut of course lards this climactic scene with much personal bric-a-brac. The Stevenson passage being quoted and learned is:

"I will be very quiet,” replied Archie.  “And I will be baldly frank.  I do not love my father; I wonder sometimes if I do not hate him.  There’s my shame; perhaps my sin; at least, and in the sight of God, not my fault.  How was I to love him?  He has never spoken to me, never smiled upon me; I do not think he ever touched me...

Truffaut was haunted by the fact he never knew his natural father. The "Where's the father?" question of The 400 Blows carries forward for further elucidation. It's surely likely that Truffaut had conversations like this with André Bazin, the man who did love and smile upon him. But Truffaut isn't finished. He adds a sentence to the recited passage not in Stevenson's book:

He was more afraid of death than of anything else, and he died as he thought he would while the first snows of winter fell.

And indeed snow begins to fall on our tender man-boy scene, quickly blanketing the landscape. Once again, Truffaut freezes sexuality so that boy-love may burn.

The Soft Skin provides a boy-moment so brief it's easy to miss. The film tells the story of Pierre Lachenay, a famous literary critic whose weak character sees him embark on a fatally hapless affair with a younger woman. The protagonist's name is an unsubtle clue. "Pierre" from Jean-Pierre Léaud and "Lachenay" from Robert Lachenay, Truffaut's best friend from eleven years of age. It's another look at Antoine's possible future without mentoring influence. Pierre Lachenay is a famous literary critic, a successful in-demand public lecturer, but lacks strength of character. His affair with flight attendant Nicole is cowardly and near-farcical at times. After bungling a possible rapprochement with his angry wife, she shoots him dead. With Truffaut, when sex isn't put in the freezer, as it is with boys, love puts death high in the saddle.

At the midpoint of Soft Skin, the Balzac moment in 400 Blows, Lachenay delivers a public lecture on André Gide. This is to introduce a screening of Marc Allégret's documentary With André Gide. Allégret became Gide's loved-boy when he was fifteen and the author forty-seven. As with Pasolini-Ninetto and Truffaut-Léaud, it was an affair leading to the boy's lifelong career in filmmaking. The documentary alludes tastefully to Gide's pederasty, speaking of his "sensual awakening" in Algeria and Tunisia over images of carefree nude boys leaping into a swimming hole.

After Lachenay delivers his lecture—money for old rope; he only accepted the gig to be with his paramour—he dismisses an invitation to stay and watch the documentary. No interest. Nicole is waiting. The very short clip we see of the documentary shows Gide mentoring a young piano player. On first viewing, I thought the young pianist a boy. We only see him briefly, partially, side-on and with an androgynous hairstyle and facial profile. But the full documentary shows it's a teenage girl. Antoine has been at his mother's dressing table again! For the purposes of our film, we see Lachenay's weakness: his attainment of intellectual elevation has become nothing more than a means to income, popularity, and dalliance. His distinct lack of interest in the vital task of mentoring exemplifies his fatal flaw. The dystopian warning of Fahrenheit 451 applies at both the personal and societal level.

But in the context of Truffaut's future films, the Gide clip with androgynous mentee is pregnant with premonition. Truffaut claimed a filmmaker only had a few films in him, "and if he makes more, it is because he experiments subsequently with different combinations."^[10] For Truffaut the cinema is his secret chamber of experimentation and discovery. He spoke of the religious intensity of his boyhood movie-watching. Penniless, he'd sneak into the cinema through a bathroom window, then be wracked with stomach-cramping guilt. He would move closer and closer to the screen, wanting to blot out the world, press himself physically into the screen of dreaming, give birth to a new self. It was here he experienced sexual awakening, love of women and film, adolescent escape from mother and a loveless male world. Stomach-cramping guilt was the birth-pangs of a society-defying artist. All his life he mixed these biographical strands in his celluloid crucible to produce original creations. He favoured literary adaptations for their structural containment, test-tubes in which to pour his hot personal brews. With his intense black-eyed stare and buttoned-up rectitude, Truffaut was a mad scientist on a fiercely taut leash. Nowhere was this more directly expressed than in The Wild Child, but all his films are the result of his original, luridly complex sex-and-death dreaming.

In Jules and Jim, Truffaut splits his psyche between the two male leads, the shy and faithful Jules and the confident womanising artist Jim. It's his only film to explore same-age male friendship and it is negotiated through a shared sexual obsession with Catherine, a fatally enigmatic and volatile temptress. It is Jim who is assigned the task of going the full distance, embracing Catherine in death, leaving cautious Jules to record a tribute. In society, the successful artist always hides his light under a bushel. In Shoot the Piano Player, Truffaut interweaves an experiment: What if Antoine had met a loving mentor? The result is Fido's exuberant romp and life-enhancing engagement with the men he happens to meet. Fido's is an ideal boy-life, the Eiffel Tower an accessible jungle gym to climb, and he's untouched by the film's overarching drama of mother-fraught sex and death.

In Truffaut's films, boys who have no mother succeed. Two 12-year-old boys, Patrick and Julien, star in Small Change (1976). Patrick lives alone with a caring father and wins through to a successful climax, attaining a sweet first kiss with the girl he likes. Julien lives with his mother and grandmother, who horribly abuse him, and the boy simply disappears when rescued by alerted officials. The most tragic part of Julien's plight is his inability to accept a proffered friendship from Patrick. And it's compounded by his never having the luck to meet the film's good man, a born mentor and gifted teacher—his name, Jean-François, a nod to the Truffaut-Léaud duo. Instead, Julien's teacher is a woman—a good woman and a dedicated professional, but one who admits to not fully understanding boys—and she's understandably distraught at not having noticed Julien's distress. With Julien, Truffaut ponders: what if Antoine's mom was in full control and no René Bigey existed? An odd storyline to put in his most light-hearted feel-good film, but perhaps the only bearable place for it.

* * *

Three Truffaut films—The Bride Wore Black (1968), A Gorgeous Girl Like Me (1972), and The Story of Adèle H. (1975)—perform experiments in androgyny. Truffaut's two primary filmmaking interests, women and boys, become alchemic reagents in cinema's Balzacian alkahest, supplied earlier in The 400 Blows. These films take as their starting point Antoine's dalliance at his mother's dressing table. He dons the full mask of femininity and our films are ready to roll. Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau) in The Bride Wore Black is a masculinised automaton, fixated on the male psychopathic task of serial murder. She represents another what if...? experiment: if Antoine, like a Shakespearean boy-actor, took on the role of a woman, what would she do? Julie Kohler's blank expressionlessness is borrowed from Antoine's stoic forbearance under the rain of 400 blows. During the opening titles, Julie is ritualistically desexed. A hypnotically repetitive printing press churns out photographs of a topless Julie, turning her into a emotionless, processed artefact, ready for Antoine to take up.

Camille Paglia's writings on the beautiful boy describe Julie perfectly: "The beautiful boy was desired but not desiring. He occupied a presexual or suprasexual dimension... The beautiful boy dreams but neither thinks nor feels. His eyes fix on nothing. His face is a pale oval upon which nothing is written." When Antoine dons his female mask and leaves the dressing table, Julie becomes "the beautiful boy as destroyer": "the beautiful boy leaves the realm of contemplation for the realm of action, [and] the result is chaos and crime."^[11]

The Bride Wore Black is a revenge fantasy. The male group which ignored Antoine, left him lost and alone at the sea's margin, is tracked down and ruthlessly executed. We see this criminally negligent male group in an apartment across from the church where Julie's wedding is in progress. There are five men present—the five friends from The Mischief Makers have grown up, and the un-mentored pack of lawless 12-year-olds haven't matured well. They drink and brag and fool around with a rifle. At the film's midpoint, two men take turns to aim the rifle at the weathercock atop the tall church spire, while the others offer encouragement. The men's attitude to sex and love, to the wedding in progress, is that of the mischief makers now turned sourly adult. Aiming to shoot the rooster atop the soaring phallic spire is a resentful attack on the Eiffel Tower symbol of The 400 Blows. An attack, that is, on the manly pederastic tradition of loving mentorship. This portrays both society's attitude and the immature men's fatal estrangement from male tradition.

But we see the gun's crosshairs travel down the length of the phallic tower. It pauses briefly on the clock-face. Time, an agent of maturation, perhaps deserves a bitter bullet. But Delvaux, the criminal thug of the group, keeps lowering the gunsight till it is aimed squarely at Julie's head. Truffaut mentioned in an interview that Julie was a virgin, another point of contact with Antoine, who, with boyish bravado, told the psychologist how he'd almost had sex once with a prostitute. But in Antoine's world, not even paid sex-workers bother to turn up for an adolescent boy.

The other men finally realise things have gone too far and try to wrestle the gun from Delvaux. The gun randomly goes off—these men have no control over their manly function—and it is the bridegroom who is killed. Julie had been on the cusp of initiation into sexual love, with a man shown to have been her beloved perfect ideal, a worthy avatar of André Bazin. Once again, Antoine's need for a loving mentor has been thwarted. Not even the disguise of his mother's most beautiful white gown could defeat society's opposition. And so the hellfire of revenge plays out to its gruesome conclusion.

Reflecting on The Bride Wore Black in later years, Truffaut became less and less happy with it. He counted it one of his least successful efforts. He blamed technical issues for Jeanne Moreau's performance producing the wrong emotional tone. Moreau herself said she found it a very difficult acting assignment. The fact is, she was the wrong actress for the role. Moreau is all warmth and interiority. Trying for the icy and spectral, she comes off lifeless and mummified. Perhaps Truffaut was getting ahead of himself with this film. It was only after finishing it that he met Catherine Deneuve who, with her ice-cool glamour, might have made the bride's butchery something to savour. Truffaut's first experiment in androgyny produced no reactive fizz to overflow the test-tube, but his next two efforts would be far more successful.

A Gorgeous Girl Like Me also reimagines Antoine's life as a young woman, but this time for laughs. It's an underrated film in the Truffaut canon, an inspired and often hilarious comedy. It's genesis was typically autobiographical, Truffaut claiming that "I am both of the characters: Camille Bliss and Stanislas, the sociologist." Truffaut identifying as Bliss links us again to Antoine at his mother's dressing table. In Gorgeous Girl, Antoine's suppressed ebullience and prankishness are let off the leash, allowed to rollick freely in the drag capering of the divine Camille Bliss (Bernadette Lafont). Antoine's every action was shut down; Camille gets away with murder. Antoine was passive in the face of crushing social ignorance; Camille deals with dim-witted society like a tornado in a trailer park. In this film, instead of channelling Balzac, Antoine is possessed by Shakespeare's Cleopatra. Lafont's performance in bringing this off is superb: think of Cleopatra as played by Huck Finn, boying her greatness in the posture of a whore.

Camille Bliss's adventure picks up from where Antoine's ended, with an escape from the same Observation Centre for Juvenile Delinquents. Unlike Antoine's swift, neat slide under a fence, Camille clambers, in most unladylike fashion, over a high wall. She then parodies Antoine's run through the countryside with a frantic dash across a field, tight little skirt flapping with provocative freedom. Reaching the nearest road, she puts on her high heels—Antoine's missing weapon—flags down Clovis, her first man-sucker, and dives headlong into another five-man male-group romp. The five boys of The Mischief Makers certainly paid for their early misbehaviour. Truffaut's art always honoured women's power over men, never more so than in Gorgeous Girl, so the charges of misogyny the film received are just another comic element in this superb comedy.

Sexual allure is of course the difference between Antoine and Camille's stories. Women see through Camille's camp theatrics, but the five men remain fatally attracted, even as they're ruined, jailed, run over, shot, and tipped off the top of tall buildings. It throws the casually cruel indifference Antoine received into sharp relief. If Antoine's film had been made in ancient Athens, Gorgeous Girl suggests, the 400 blows might have been dealt rather than received. When Clovis begins making love to Camille in his car, Camille assumes the idealised Greek boy position, remaining calmly detached from such carnal carry-on.

The comic high point of this fine film was Camille's relationship with Arthur, the mystical rat exterminator. Charles Denner here, as in his two other Truffaut films, is an avatar of the director. And he gets a sound parodic drubbing. Arthur is given to speaking at length about his lifelong "vocation" of exterminating, a joke at the expense of Truffaut's artistic mission to find and purge inner pests. During one talk, Arthur asks Camille a rhetorical question: why doesn't he kill spiders? Camille's bored and we don't get an answer—until a later scene.

Arthur first meets Camille when he's stunned to find her in the back of his truck, putting on a pair of overalls. Huck Finn has fallen from the sky; it will be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Arthur is bowled over and immediately jumps to follow her orders. But Arthur is an idealist and a good Catholic, so he can't admit to sexually desiring Camille. This cross-dressing and guilt fuses Truffaut's attraction to women with his sexless boy-love. Arthur sublimates his desire by plying Camille with wads of money. Her vixen charms must be honoured somehow. Despite Truffaut's rather hectic womanising, he did have an idealistic element in his makeup. His films never include full nudity or explicit sex scenes, and he would look away during such depictions in the films of others. Given Camille's Antoine-origins, we have another example of Truffaut toying with the murky twists and turns of his own psyche.

The sexual tension Arthur experiences with Camille is brought to a head in an hilarious and personally charged scene. Our mystical exterminator takes Camille on a job. They arrive at a cluttered "rotting attic", a repository of family memories. Arthur explains the danger posed by the pests if not exterminated: "The house would collapse. It's like a cancer of the brain." This is comedy at its blackest and most prophetic, the brain tumour which was to kill Truffaut perhaps already stirring. At this inspired moment, Arthur then says, "The cruelty of it all." He's looking at a spider's web where two flies are caught. The two flies represent Truffaut and his step-dad, both trapped in the family web spun and ruled by a capricious dominatrix. Now we have our answer to why Arthur cannot kill spiders. Nonetheless he cries with ironic bravado, "They will be avenged!" This is the moment Camille trips over a rug. Arthur rushes to help. Idealism cracks. Camille firmly pulls Arthur into a sexual encounter. Vengeance, capitulation, it's all one in the game of love. No one escapes the mother-spun web of sex.

But Camille is an Antoine-infused drag act, so sex with her, for Truffaut-as-Arthur, is an unacceptable breach of an impermeable psychic barrier. Arthur compulsively repeats the "accidental" sex act, rushing Camille from job to job, tripping her up and—oops-a-daisy, Missus, let me help you with that! This is pure boyish hijinks: the boys of The Mischief Makers couldn't envisage a better way to score. It's the sort of fun one might expect in an English boys' boarding school. Except that here each sexual encounter ends with Arthur flagellating himself for his appalling, beastly, unacceptable behaviour.

Arthur's Christian guilt is the only time this sort of puritanism is utilised by Truffaut. Sex in his non-Doinel films usually leads to insanity or death, but it operates as a dark force of nature, struggled with not through moral proscription but as a dangerously compulsive search for meaning. Christian guilt is used in Arthur's case both for comedic effect and to combat the Huck Finn within Cleopatra. Bernadette Lafont belongs that to that small group of leading ladies whom Truffaut didn't have an affair with. Truffaut didn't so much mix work and pleasure as rely on a fusion of the two for his life as man and artist. His initial overheated cinematic experience in early adolescence became his modus operandi. And Truffaut's capacity for boy-love, we've seen, cannot admit sex. In Gorgeous Girl, this condition takes the form of transcendental law. Self-control isn't enough, one's heart must be pure. So Arthur's fall leads him to the logical decision to commit suicide. Which in this film is treated in suitably hilarious fashion.

Arthur drags Camille to the grand Saint-Nazaire Cathedral: both man and boy must die for their sins in the standard Christian way. They ascend to the top of a large stone tower—another Eiffel Tower-linked phallic symbol, proving a pederastic reading. But Arthur's grand gesture of suicide becomes just another pratfall in the hands of canny Camille. She agrees they should jump together—but with eyes closed. She then steps back to wave her deluded dill goodbye. Those who don't learn from history, who can no longer read the arcane symbology, are lost. The sequence is concluded by Camille making another Antoine-run for freedom—for the entire film, like a hyperactive boy, she never stops running—complete with masculine gait, twirling skirt, stilettos adroitly clicking across the flagstones.

The Story of Adèle H. (1975) is Truffaut's most curious and personal experiment in androgyny. The film tracks the real Adèle Hugo's descent into madness due to an obsessive, unrequited love. Truffaut described the film as one long close-up of actress Isabelle Adjani's face, and the obsession depicted onscreen was mirrored by the director's own. The role called for an actress in her thirties, but the 43-year-old Truffaut had become infatuated with the 19-year-old Adjani and wanted no one else. She declined the role at first and to secure her services he "almost kidnapped the nineteen-year-old actress." This unrequited infatuation persisted for the entire shoot, Adjani telling Truffaut's biographers: “I spent my time warding him off as a woman and as an actress."

Adèle Hugo is another of Truffaut's metamorphic experiments, Antoine imagined as a beautiful young woman, one who employs her Balzac-inspired writing ability for a strange quest. Certainly Adjani as gamine muse was very different to Truffaut's previous actress passions. His move from Catherine Deneuve to Isabelle Adjani brings to mind Ava Gardner's comment concerning Frank Sinatra's later taking up with Mia Farrow: "I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a boy." Truffaut may have lamented his failure to gain Adjani's bed—a rare strike-out for the dashing and persistent director—but true to his destiny and calling, it was just what his art required. Like the onscreen Adèle, Truffaut found the making of this film an unusually stressful affair:

Truffaut’s passion took the form of enthrallment. He seemed hypnotized, more than he had ever been on any of his films. “I watch her act, I help her as I can, uttering thirty words when she would like a hundred, or fifty when only one, but the right one, is needed, for everything is a matter of vocabulary in our strange association. I don’t know Isabelle Adjani. Yet, in the evening, my eyes and ears are tired from having looked at her too hard and listened to her all day.”^[12]

The Story of Adèle H. opens with a dark, misty shot of Adèle in a row boat, approaching a port. So we've picked up Antoine's life from the end of The 400 Blows, unfreezing the final frame and setting the boy on a mystical adventure across the sea. Adèle in Halifax, chasing her beloved Lieutenant Pinson, is plagued by drenching nightmares. She dreams she is drowning, repeatedly pulled beneath the churning water. She's wearing sacrificial white. Antoine as Hylas is being pulled by the Naiads into a feminine pool. Herakles wasn't there for his loved-boy—the story of Antoine's life—and he is lost. Naiads and their water, we know, weaken or hermaphrodise maleness. When Antoine comes ashore, his white chiton is dark and his gender female. Metamorphosis is complete. We now have another formulation for Antoine's haunting 400 Blows question: Should I...?

Truffaut's hypnotic obsession with his androgynous muse contained his age-old desire to merge with cinema's sexual dreams—now dreams of his own creation. In the film, he makes a brief cameo as a soldier Adèle mistakes for Pinson. Adèle reels back as Truffaut turns to meet her with his black-eyed stare. A sad joke, Truffaut called it, deflecting and downplaying. His cameo was the shaman leaving no trick untried: Look into my eyes, Isabelle...I am Lieutenant Pinson. Adjani had to ward off Truffaut, protect herself as both "a woman and as an actress"—because the director kept trying merge his persona with hers. He insisted Adjani keep her body rigid, one of Truffaut's most distinctive characteristics. The actress had to obsessively squeeze her left arm with her right hand, a signature Truffaut tic he employed as an actor and in life. Adjani would also scream herself hoarse every night so that her voice would be low enough to satisfy Truffaut. Even for a gifted shaman, it's not easy to create the perfect boy.

A curious boy-moment in the film: Adèle spies on her uninterested beloved, Lieutenant Pinson, as he enters a woman's bedroom and begins making love to her. We see Adèle eagerly ducking and rushing to stay hidden but gain the perfect vantage point. She wants to witness the full sexual mystery, exactly like the boys in The Mischief Makers. As the scene fades out, the two lovers now on the bed and getting down to it, a small enigmatic smile starts on Adèle's lips. Truffaut described this inexplicable moment as "pure cinema". But it's also a mischievous grin of complicity—wait till the other boys hear about this! This complicity is proven in a scene in the bank. After telling a young boy a typically gratuitous lie about her identity—something she does constantly throughout the film—she changes her mind before leaving, returning to the boy to tell him who she really is. The truth is obviously startling, the boy staring after the departing Adèle for some time.

Adèle's obsessive love for Lieutenant Pinson is a thing unto itself. By the end of the film, tracking him to Barbados, she no longer even recognises him. Pinson is nothing more than an attractive figurine, a toy soldier who represents the category of loving-mentorship Antoine couldn't find. Adèle's dramatic confrontation with the aloof military officer takes place at the film's midpoint—so often a Balzacian moment—and to bring it off, Adèle disguises herself as a man. Although Adjani as a man looks, if anything, younger than Antoine. The scene takes place in a graveyard and, compared to the ghost of Balzac, we see Pinson to be a man of far less substance. Adèle's inability to see this, to never realise the man she seeks doesn't exist, is the film's driving rack. Antoine, a rambunctious realist, was able to access a ghost of manhood past. Adèle-as-boy, seeking an embodiment of the lost ideal, is driven insane.

The scene following the graveyard encounter is ripped straight from The 400 Blows. Adèle goes to a little cabinet on the wall of her room. It's the same size as Antoine's cabinet above his bed. Adèle opens it up to show a replica of the boy's Balzac shrine, except here two candles burn for a picture of Lieutenant Pinson. Clasping her hands together, she prays fervently to the icon of divine manhood. An extended close-up shows Adèle trapped in her madness. Her glassy eyes spill one silent silvery tear, mirroring Antoine trapped behind prison bars. In her search for the man behind the mirage, Adèle has tried séances, hypnotism, and pagan worship, all to no avail. A good man, it seems, is impossible to find.

Adèle's journey maps a reverse path of Victor's in The Wild Child, moving from civilisation to bereft primitivism. Toward the end we see Adèle mimic Victor's initial plight: personal hygiene doesn't interest her; she's chased by dogs and kids as a freakish curiosity; she prefers to sleep on the floor beside her bed. Eventually she's placed in the insane asylum that was Victor's intended destination before a loving mentor intervened. For Truffaut, Adèle's journey contains an element of riddance. Gifting a loved-boy with sexual desirability drove the director to distraction. "Oh, my eyes are aching!" Adèle cries as she scribbles madly in her journal. Exactly what Truffaut complained of after each day's filming. Adèle the sweet young ingénue has been invaded by a black-eyed vampire, Truffaut-as-Antoine, refusing to give up his adolescent hunger. Trying to fuse the two sexual poles of woman and boy was artistically audacious but done with the proviso Adèle dies. Unpersoned, the young woman is locked up permanently in an asylum. The penultimate scene lingers on her final resting place in a graveyard. Done and dusted. Almost. The very last shot shows a ghostly shot of Adèle, back on the rocky shore of the sea, once again dressed in white, intoning hauntingly: "This incredible thing, that a young girl should step over the ocean, leave the old world for the new world to join her lover—this thing I will accomplish." Yes, she will accomplish it. Our shape-shifting androgyny will circle back to become Victor in The Wild Child, Truffaut's masterpiece and direct answer to Antoine's perplexed question. But it can only occur now she has risen as a purified spirit, sex and death left safely in the grave.

Truffaut's career was cut suddenly short at fifty-two by a brain tumour. His first brain haemorrhage occurred just hours after completing the scenario for his next film, The Little Thief, so it never got made. This film was to be another replay of The 400 Blows with an adolescent girl in the Antoine role. The girl was to find a mentor—in the cinema!—and begin a sexual relationship with him. Perhaps Adèle's brain meltdown was a warning Truffaut should have heeded. The early split Truffaut put between sex and loving mentorship was a personal defence strategy, a way of keeping fatal mother-love at bay. The boys in Truffaut's films never have to confront death. In Shoot the Piano Player, a boy shoves two gun-wielding thugs aside without consequence while a woman is brought down by freakish bad luck. In Small Change (1976), a boy being horribly abused is whisked away to safety and the abusive mother punished. In the same film, a little boy falls out a tenth-floor window and jumps up from the ground safe and sound and with a big happy laugh. This magic was essential for Truffaut the artist but at odds with Truffaut the humanist's search for wholeness, for the missing tradition of loving mentorship. Threatening this self-preserving divide seems to have cleaved his brain in two. Mother does always have the last word, after all.

* * *

Truffaut's most polemical statement about loving mentorship comes in The Green Room (1978), his last film with a significant boy-character. In the film, Truffaut plays Julien Davenne, a man obsessed with remembering the dead. This anti-social passion gradually becomes a full-blown cult, centred on his beautiful young wife who, eleven years ago, died just after they were married. So Truffaut's death-steeped sex achieves its fullest expression. Why go through all those fraught sexual struggles to find death when you can cut out the middle-woman and love the grinning skull itself? In this film, Truffaut takes the grimly obsessive ambience of Adèle H., buries it in a crypt, lights a hundred candles, and lets both man and loving-mentorship suffocate.

Julien is, fittingly, an obituarist who works for a dying newspaper. But he lives in a home which mirrors Jean Itard's in The Wild Child. Julien has a housekeeper who has in her care a deaf boy, Georges, around ten or eleven years old. The one light in Julien's stygian life is his relationship with the boy. Julien's love interest, Cécilia Mandel, is a match made in death worship, and Julien's best friend has long since become his most hated enemy and the final nail in the dour man's withdrawal from society. This throws into stark relief Julien's close mentoring relationship with young Georges.

We first meet Georges when he rushes to greet Julien arriving home. Julien, hanging up his coat, gives the boy a quick kiss on the top of his head. It is the only such marker of affection Julien deploys in the film. In fact, it stands as Truffaut's one and only onscreen kiss. Agesilaos, King of the Spartans, would be proud. Julien goes with the boy to look at some lantern slides. Truffaut was noted for his ability to talk with children as equals and Julien has this quality. He guides, corrects, listens, and compliments Georges, easily conversant with the deaf boy's sign language. We are also, quite comically, introduced to Julien's death obsession. Georges isn't overly impressed with the slides of boring insects Julien is projecting on the screen. So Julien brings out his beloveds, slides of dead soldiers. He had fought in World War I, over a decade ago, and felt guilt at having survived his fallen comrades. With quiet reverence, the dark truth is shown. This slide, Georges, shows some dead soldiers on the battlefield. Look, a dead soldier caught in a tree, blown there by a bomb. Yes, Georges, that man has been decapitated. Georges of course loves all this. This is the sort of mystery-guidance Antoine and the mischief makers needed.

The most incongruously light-hearted scene occurs when Julien is shaving one morning. Georges appears and cheekily imitates Julien's actions. Some playful dotting of the boy's nose with shaving cream follows. More happy scenes follow. Georges brings Julien a letter announcing the good news he has won ownership of an old, damaged chapel. This is to be the new site of his cult. Julien is overjoyed, tells the boy all about it, announcing they will work on the chapel together: "I will take you with me." And off to work they indeed go. Packing up things in the old room, Julien shows Georges a framed photograph of his cult's presiding goddess, his long-dead wife. He speaks, for the only time, openly and honestly of how he needs his lost love to live eternally in the shrine they're building. "Go on, Georges," he concludes. "You think I'm a crazy old man. You're right." Nowhere else does Julien come close to the honest introspection he shares with Georges—not to mention the shocking hint of humorous self-deprecation! Cécilia is a beautiful, loving, and good woman, but her and Julien's search for a combined death-consecration darkens their relationship. The battle between the sexes is played out in tombs and cemeteries. Cécilia  can only ever be an avatar of the death goddess, she who rules so claustrophobically over Julien's candle-crowded crypt. Paglia says the beautiful boy represents an "attempt to separate imagination from death and decay." Georges is Julien's chance to choose life. In Truffaut's films, we see over and over how important loving mentorship is for boys. We now see that a man's life can also depend on it.

The fork in the road appears. Georges stands on a chair to get down Julien's precious slides. The boy's intellectual curiosity has been piqued by the man in his life. But he accidentally drops and breaks them. This comes straight after Julien has introduced Cécilia to his completed, candle-lit shrine. Georges has accidentally broken some mementos of the dead, and the result is a Rubicon, or Styx rather, crossed. Julien emerges from his room to angrily scold the boy and send him to bed with no dinner. No discussion, cold dismissal. The ultimate crime in Truffaut's world. Shockingly, Julien never sees the boy again, and his final death spiral is rapid.

That night, Georges sneaks out of the house, arrives at a shopfront and throws a rock through a display window. Inside are two female mannequin heads, one of which he's about to steal as the cops nab him. It all happens so fast one scrambles to process the scene's importance and tragedy. Julien's affectionate mentorship is influencing the boy in the usual inspirational way. Julien has shared the importance of his cult of the dead with Georges, explaining some of its mysteries. Earlier, Julien had employed an artisan to make a replica mannequin of Julie, his deceased wife and presiding goddess. The result so appalled Julien he had it destroyed. Georges didn't know of this, but he is channelling Julien's belief system, trying instinctually to make amends, to re-join Julien in their former warm relationship.

Julien joins in the search for the missing Georges, but it is Cécilia  who rescues him from the police station and it's the housekeeper who cares for the distraught boy. Julien is nowhere to be seen. Georges has been returned to the women's quarters. The film's climax sees Julien leave the house for one last, fatal trip to the chapel. We see Georges rush from window to window, trying to make eye contact with Julien. It's snowing, sex is frozen, the violins are ready. But Julien stares implacably, obliviously ahead, his date with death unalterable. The final boy-moment in Truffaut's cinema couldn't be more powerful—it's a matter of life and death: boys need to be seen.

* * *

The Wild Child (1969), based on a true story, is Truffaut's ancient Athenian masterpiece, a film which unfreezes The 400 Blows' final frame and answers Antoine's perplexed question of "What now?" The film was dedicated to Jean-Pierre Léaud and an early scene gives us the famous tableau showing Truffaut's holy trinity of loving mentorship. Twelve-year-old Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, stands in front of a mirror, trying to grab the reflected apple of knowledge Jean Itard holds above his head. Standing in back of this pair, the mirror shows the elderly Pinel, Itard's boss. The ghost of Bazin is risen and the boy's desperately needed loving mentorship is formally blessed.

The film was shot in black-and-white and further archaized with iris-outs and an austere education-documentary ambience. A working rule of thumb of Truffaut's: the more intense a scene's emotion the more restrained should be the framing. The near straight-jacketed Wild Child is Truffaut's most heart-felt expression of his life-long commitment to the cause of children in general and boys in particular. What Truffaut and Antoine missed in early adolescence is here spelt out in meticulous, unsentimental detail. Victor's emergence from lost, grunting animality to smart, creative, life-loving lad gives us Truffaut's one untrammelled feel-good love story.

The 400 Blows ended with Antoine stranded alone in the vastness of nature, and that is where we first meet the as yet nameless Victor. He is a naked beast of the wild, covered in filth, alternately hiding and scrabbling about on all fours as he ekes out a precarious hand-to-mouth survival. Meet Victor's mom: Mother Nature will today be serving her son a grubby root and another scar or two to add to his collection. Victor has a close resemblance to the abused Julien in Small Change, who was similarly scarified. Unbelievably, The Wild Child copped criticism for siding with corrupt society over nature. Critic Mireille Amiel wrote at the time, "How can the rebel of The Four Hundred Blows place himself alongside the oppressor, even one as sympathetic as Itard?"^[13] It's hard to know whether cruelty or ignorance predominates in such a view. Both Victor and Antoine were in the same predicament, only Victor's was far more dire. With hindsight, it's not hard to see why the sixties revolution went so madly off the rails.

Truffaut crowds this film with beautifully composed boy-moments, and the first is of the naked boy stretching out to drink from a rock pool. It instantly brings to mind Narcissus, heavily ironic for the wild boy has no identity and no capacity to recognise beauty, his own or any other. But he does share with Narcissus a dangerously autistic isolation, and without intervention his fate will mirror his mythological forbear's lonely pining away.

Perhaps the most poignant shot of all soon follows. The sun is setting and the wild boy is sitting high up in the crook of a tree. The camera pulls right back as the boy rhythmically rocks back and forth. He becomes a barely discernible speck of humanity in a vast sea of indifferent forest. Antoine has receded and regressed far out into nature, sans clothes, sans name, sans humanity. Has there been a more evocative shot of man's aloneness in an uncaring universe? In the wild boy's back-to-nature life, if he is to eke out an ounce of consolation, it can only come from himself.

But never fear: comes the rescue party. Men with guns and a gruff instinct for doing the right thing. Paglia says of a baby's birth, "the umbilical is a hawser sawed through by a social rescue party." And this is what occurs in the forest of Aveyron. Yanking the kid free from the womb of mother nature isn't easy. Finally they manage to extract the tyke—from a tight little burrow! The rescuer holds the newborn up, a fine boy, kicking and screaming with rude health, but badly in need of a wash.

The scene is also the kidnapping of a pubescent boy from the women's quarters, so he can be reborn in the male group and grow into a man. In this we run into problems. The wild boy's first entry into society has worrying parallels with Antoine's experience. In a nearby village and then a Parisian institute for deaf-mutes, he's briefly a figure of curiosity but, when his manners prove displeasing, he's left to sit in corners to take up his practice of self-rocking.

During this prologue section, only one man, the elderly villager Rémy, takes an affectionate interest in the boy. Rémy is based on Clair, a school gardener who at the turn of the 18^th Century, did look after the real wild boy before taking him to Jean Itard at the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes. It's typical of Truffaut, who was very faithful to the real story, to give this man his due—something the real Itard perhaps skimped on. Clair cleaned, clothed and fed the boy, and upon leaving him at the deaf-mute institute, offered to take the boy in if the institute no longer needed him. Boys in need of instruction have had, for the bulk of history, no trouble attracting good men to the cause.

The wild boy's first months at the institute are not good. Apart from being utilised as a freak exhibit, he spends his time finding places in the garden to re-bury himself in nature. So a second rescue is effected when Dr Jean Itard takes custody of the boy with the scientifically-informed intention of civilizing him. Truffaut's decision to play the lead role of Itard came late in preproduction. Once he realised he felt jealous at the prospect of another man playing the role, he stepped up. This results in some typically complex layering. Playing Itard was the fulfilment of his boyhood yearning to press into the big magic screen. It also meant he was playing a character representing both Bazin and himself in relation to both himself and Léaud. Jean-Pierre Cargol, the boy who played Victor, also found the film a significantly life-enhancing experience. All his life he maintained warm memories of his one acting experience with "great man" Truffaut. Truffaut himself was proud, almost a little boastfully, of how the shy boy blossomed during the film's making. Truffaut's official biographers report that the shoot was a very harmonious affair—no wonder when it was produced under such a dazzlingly compounded spell of loving mentorship.

Itard takes the boy home and we're introduced to his housekeeper Madame Guérin. She's intimately involved with the wild boy's emergence into civilised life. In the real story, she deserves to be recognised as the primary hero of Victor's life, caring for him till his death at forty years of age. An artist, though, has goals other than historical accuracy. Despite Truffaut hewing admirably close to the original reports of Dr Itard, in the film Madame Guérin functions as Itard's projected anima. As in Jules and Jim, Truffaut splits his psyche between two characters. Itard and Guérin operate as a seamless unity, the male half pure Enlightenment science, the female half warm nurturing love. Part of the film's drama is Itard's increasingly ineffective attempts to ensure that never the twain shall meet.

Proof for this interpretation is found in the way Itard reacts at moments of emotional intensity. The first two incidents involve Victor becoming frustrated during his lessons and falling to the floor in a temper tantrum or fit. The first thing Itard does is yell for Madame Guérin—Quickly, Madame Guérin! As she calms the boy, Itard moves to stand erect at his writing table, demonstrating that his hand is steady and his thoughts orderly. When Itard receives a letter informing him that His Excellency has approved an extension of Victor's education—something that had been troubling the doctor greatly—he races to the door of house: Madame Guérin! Quickly, Madame Guérin! At the soaring climax, when Victor returns home after all hope was lost—Madame Guérin! IMMEDIATELY, Madame Guérin! And every time she's called, Madame Guérin instantly appears, swift as thought. But, as we shall see, there are times when this surgically neat division breaks down.

For the most part, Truffaut as Itard gives us an Enlightenment man of science who is even more restrained and upright than the real-life physician in his 1801 and 1806 reports. Truffaut, never coldly clinical, always displaying a humanely dedicated sense of care for the boy, is at times a trifle stiff and self-conscious. His limited acting range lacks some nuance in important scenes. In the splitting of his psyche between two characters, Truffaut awarded the acting depth to Françoise Seigner, the actress who played Madame Guérin with perfectly pitched understatement. Although, it has to be said, she would face stiff competition for best actor beside Jean-Pierre Cargol, the gypsy boy who played Victor. There was an exhaustive search to find the right boy for the role, and Cargol's looks—"He’s a very handsome child, but I think he really looks like he came out of the woods,” wrote Truffaut—were only the start of the talent he brought to the table. It's quite extraordinary, the performance Truffaut elicits from a boy with no acting experience and, as it turned out, no desire to pursue the craft. While Truffaut's acting might not have set the world on fire, his playing opposite Cargol, directing from in front of the camera rather than behind, was an important factor in enabling the boy to turn in such a fine performance. Loving mentorship, enacted in real time to record its multi-layered historical and biographical roots, is peak Truffaut art.

The education of the wild boy begins with the basics. Not only does he need to learn how to walk and wear clothes, but he has to be taught how to look, hear, touch and feel. This is one film where reading the book it's based on adds great depth to the viewing experience. The real wild boy's insensibility to cold and heat, his visual and auditory unawareness of any phenomena not directly related to immediate survival, are quite extraordinary. His eyes roam continuously, can't stop and focus on objects, obviously designed to constantly scan the featureless bracken for food or danger. He doesn't possess the ability to cry or even sneeze. He can pick up burning coals in his hand. Civilised man is a work of deliberately fostered vulnerability. Long hot baths and massages are required to literally soften the wild boy up. From our vantage point, mother nature as parent has been for this battle-scarred boy shockingly abusive.

The first milestone in the wild boy's upward trek to civilisation is modest: he sneezes. Cargol nails a look not just of surprise, his wide-eyed gaze also hints at the boy's emerging sense of self—his body contains mysteries in need of explanation! I sneeze therefore I am. It's a beautifully intimate moment, candle-lit, Itard at his writing desk, observing with slightly more than scientific interest as Madame Guérin gives the boy a reassuring hug.

The sneeze leads us directly to the savage of Aveyron becoming a recognisable twelve-year-old boy. With becoming haircut, smart clothes, clean adorable face, his walks with Itard in the countryside are freewheeling romps of a new-found pleasure. Previous attempts to capture the wild boy always resulted in him escaping back to the only home he knew. His delight now in frolicking in the open country is conducted in looping circles round the steadily pacing, dependable Itard. Itard is the boy's centre and anchor from which he can enjoy the familiar features of his former hard-scrabble home.

Throughout his filmmaking career, Truffaut had a thing for not smiling. Like Shakespeare, he distrusted the man who smiles and smiles. It was his most constant instruction to Léaud during the shooting of The 400 Blows: don't smile. Smiling gives the game away. Truffaut's black eyes burned with a passion his terse, buttoned-up demeanour denied. Of his performance as Itard, Truffaut said that he doesn't smile. Well, almost. Truffaut spoke often and at length about his films, but he was a very private man and in interviews his frank, discursive answers were safe and surface-level. In the film, visiting neighbours, Itard is playing backgammon with his friend when he sees the wild boy outside blocking the path of another boy, Mathieu, pushing a wheelbarrow. Itard jumps up worriedly. His friend grabs his arm, indicating he needn't be such a fusspot. And we soon see the wild boy enjoy being pushed around in the barrow by Mathieu. A significant social success. And Itard breaks into a smile not far short of a big toothy grin. Significantly, for this scene Madame Guérin was at home and unable to be called upon. Possibly if Truffaut was directing another actor, he wouldn't have allowed such a wanton display of emotion. It's the first hint that Itard's rules of austere decorum are going to be tested.

The wild boy's awakened trust and affection mean the real lessons can begin. We see it's going to be a long road, but progress is quickly evident. This leads to the film's midpoint where we get one of the most important milestones: Madame Guérin and Itard together finally give the lad a name: Victor. A name the boy responds to eagerly. By the sunlit window, Itard puts his hands on the boy's head and shoulder: "You will be called Victor." And we get an iris-out closing in on Victor's face. There are several moments like this, and they can't help but resonate with Antoine's final freeze-frame in The 400 Blows. Victor here has a similarly enigmatic, quizzical look on his face—the difference is that his face remains animated and is framed by the loving hands of his mentor. Truffaut's demand that boys be seen is once again—in suitably subdued fashion—shouted from the rooftops.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Victor's move to civilisation was his continuing relationship with nature. From the start of his new life indoors, he exhibited a constant, yearning attraction to nature. When it rained, Victor would rush outdoors, cavort delightedly on all fours, thrusting his face up into the falling rain, feeling it, tasting it, trying to merge with it—much like a young Truffaut once did with the drenching spectacle found in the cinema. Brothers in pagan cultism.

All his life, Victor couldn't be budged from his distinct preference for water over any other drink. Itard's journal-writing voice-over, faithful to the original report, records:

Victor has always shown a marked preference for water, and the way he drinks it shows he finds great pleasure in it. He stands near the window, gazing upon the countryside, as if in this moment this child of nature sought to reunite the two blessings to survive his loss of freedom—a drink of pure water and the sight of sunlight on the countryside.

Other moments of Victor communing with nature seem more profound. One such scene, only hinted at by Truffaut, is best taken directly from Itard's report:

When the severity of the season drove every other person out of the garden, [Victor] delighted in taking a great many turns about it; after which he used to seat himself on the edge of a bowl of water [pond]. I have often stopped for whole hours together, and, with unspeakable pleasure, to examine him in this situation; to observe how all his convulsive motions, and that continual rocking of his whole body diminished, and by degrees subsided, to give place to a more tranquil attitude; and how insensibly his face, insignificant or distorted as it might be, took the well-defined character of sorrow, or melancholy reverie, in proportion as his eyes were steadily fixed on the surface of the water, and when he threw into it, from time to time, some remains of withered leaves.^[14]

Victor here gives us an extraordinary glimpse into the earliest origins of religion. It is the beginnings of a pagan cult we saw another adolescent boy autochthonously develop in the film Equus (1977). Itard recorded this scene early in his first report, so the fixing of the boy's gaze was already possible, but only during moments of "contemplative ecstasy". Victor at first had no language, was less civilised than a domesticated dog or cat, so we can only vaguely imagine his experience. Itard was deeply moved by it, his writing tilting Romantic to record it in his scientific report. The boy's instinct to throw the withered leaves, make an offering, is stunning. Water is life, the pond our origins. Could puberty be the original first-mover of man's pursuit of God? Plato seemed to think so. Is the modern desire to remove adolescent boys from public life sacrilegious? Either way, Victor shows the religious instinct in man lies deep down at the level of survival.

After Victor receives his name, we track his further progress up the great chain of being into fully-realised humanity. Even the hurdles now are delightfully recognisable. Victor has occasional moments of irascible rebellion. For no good reason, he impulsively smashes his milk bowl, then accepts being sent outside with a surly shrug and scuff at the ground. He grabs up a vase, drinks from it then smashes it on the floor, delighted with the result. Who would want an adolescent boy without such irrational mood swings?

Victor's progress shows up on a later walk with Itard in the countryside. As the upright and ever-dependable Itard strides steadily along, Victor runs about but is now less interested in whooping amongst the bracken, more interested in Itard. He takes possession of Itard's walking cane, imitates his mentor, practices wielding the manly symbol. Next he's wearing Itard's top hot, capering in front of the man, clearly trying to make him laugh. The camera sides with Itard, doesn't get close enough to record any breaches of the no-smiling law.

As we enter the third act, the fine Enlightenment project takes on more and more emotional depth. Itard has always been attentive to the finest gradations of Victor's abilities and temperament. He is constantly learning the mentor business as he goes, adjusting lessons, altering approaches, allowing more time off. It's man-boy teamwork at its finest, harnessing the close bond for the elevation of both, and devoted to the end-goal of enabling Victor to become the best man he can be.

But the deepening affection Itard has for Victor doesn't fit so neatly between the neat margins of his journal. After seven months, one disappointment remains: Victor doesn't learn to talk. Itard seems to place an inordinate emphasis on attaining this. Communicative action or sign language isn't enough. Itard is a man of words, his journal-writing is constant, so naturally he wants his boy with him. Added to this, the relationship faces an external threat. Itard has been summoned to report his progress. The possibility Victor will be removed from Itard's care and placed in an insane asylum looms. As Itard grimly prepares to leave for Paris for the decision, his voice-over informs us that Madame Guérin has been in tears all day. Indeed. Where would Itard be without her? Compartmentalisation allows Itard to proceed to the Paris meeting without flinching.

We then get a typically simple, beautiful Truffaut boy-moment. Late at night, Itard away, Victor sits in the dark with a single lighted candle before him on the table. He communes gently with the dancing flame, drawn to it, fascinated by it, comforted by it. It is the candle Antoine lit for Balzac. It is the light Itard has brought into the boy's isolated darkness. It is Enlightenment education, knowledge, but also a source warmth, wonder, and love.

Directly after the candle scene, Itard arrives home with the decision on Victor's future still pending. Itard goes into the boy's room—with lighted candle—and sits down on the bed. Victor wakes, sits up, takes Itard's hand and presses it to his cheek, face, hair. Itard partly evades the moment of pure emotion. He detaches himself somewhat, musing out loud that language is also a form of communication and hopefully Victor will learn it. It's a bit like a man at a feast fixating on the one delicacy absent, but neither man nor boy can be expected to learn everything all at once. A relationship begun with man and boy at extreme poles of animality and abstraction takes time to fully fuse.

Next day, the lessons continue but now emotion threatens to swamp them. During an exercise involving putting wooden letters in large grid, Victor rebels, throws the letters across the room. This isn't random moodiness. When told to pick the letters up, Victor does, but then mutely tries to express something, only to frustratedly hurl the letters again. Itard punishes the boy by locking him in the closet. When returned to his lesson, Victor is subdued—and crying. This is too much for Itard who, after comforting the boy, quickly retreats behind his writing desk. With understatement threatening to burst the austere buckles of the film, Itard records, "Today, for the first time, Victor wept." Words have taken man far, but they can at times be laughably inadequate.

The next classroom scene dissolves the Enlightenment guardrails entirely. Victor sits on a chair blindfolded. While Itard sounds vowels, Victor is supposed to recognise and indicate them by holding up specific fingers. But the boy finds the game amusing rather than educative and keeps fooling around. Itard suddenly raps Victor across the knuckles and storms off. "I'm wasting my time with you," he declares. "I'm sorry that I know you." We have moved from Enlightenment science to love story. Itard's heated words are expressing emotions of exactly the opposite nature. The verdict on whether Victor will stay is still pending. Itard fears he could soon lose Victor. Educational progress is the one straw that might save him, and the boy is enjoying Itard's company too much to care. The education of Victor was a project initiated by Itard's professional ego. It has become much more. Victor now cries for the second time, blindfold still on, only able to hear Itard's words, not see him. Itard, clinging to the frail craft of his science, wonders how it could be that the boy seems to have understood his words. An appearance by Madame Guérin at this juncture might have helped. At least he does relent, comforts Victor with the hand-on-face language the boy understands.

This tense situation leads to our most touching moment of Victor's nature worship. Late at night, Itard emerges from the darkness with a lighted candle. He approaches the window of Victor's bedroom and looks down on the lawn: the boy is kneeling and swaying under a full moon. This scene was dwelt upon at length by Thomas Mann at the start of Joseph and his Brothers. Young Joseph, a charismatic boy who sometimes strayed from his father's stern religion, bared his young body to the moon with vaguely intuited pagan eroticism. The original Itard recorded similar moments of Victor's full-moon worship in his report:

When, in a moon-light night, the rays of that luminary penetrated into his room, he seldom failed to awake out of his sleep, and to place himself before the window. There he remained, during a part of the night, standing motionless, his neck extended, his eyes fixed towards the country illuminated by the moon, and, carried away in a sort of contemplative ecstasy, the silence of which was interrupted only by deep-drawn inspirations, after considerable intervals, and which were always accompanied with a feeble and plaintive sound.

The director makes an interesting change from his source. Truffaut, as Itard, replaces the boy at the window. The camera shows us Itard's face as often as Victor on the lawn. Truffaut's hypnotically intense eyes and upright demeanour have never been put to better use. Looking at the boy, his beauty and vulnerability and enigmatic depths, lit by the strange rays of the moon, Itard experiences his own uncanny yearnings well beyond the reach of words.

After such a scene one expects, and receives, the good news that Victor can stay. (Quickly, Madame Guérin!) In the beaten way of love stories, the drama now soars high. A perplexed Itard approaches Madame Guérin to ask about a curious chalk-holder he's found in the classroom. It's been cleverly constructed from an old kitchen utensil. Did Madame Guérin make it? No, she did not. Itard rushes to Victor who, with easy-to-understand action language, explains to his one-step-behind mentor how he made it. After hearty congratulations, not even fleeing to his writing table can calm Itard's beating heart. He records, "Victor just invented something! Victor is an inventor!" After getting a grip, the doctor appends, "Forgive me for presenting with a degree of ostentation a fact so simple and ordinary."

From here we ascend into a heavenly montage, Victor achieving mastery over all his educational tasks. Man and boy now achieve Sacred Band-level teamwork, Victor completing exercises before Itard finishes naming them. But a love story requires dramatic hurdles and the next one is a doozy. It's taken directly from Itard's original report and in neither life nor film is its purported motivation remotely convincing. Itard worries that Victor is only following the rules due to the associated rewards and punishments: "I can't say I have inspired a sense of justice in him...a sense of moral order." So he decides to test him: "I must do an abominable thing." After Victor successfully completes a task and confidently awaits acknowledgement, Itard angrily denounces the boy's effort and attempts to lock him in the closet.

I call foul here on both the real and fictional Itard. His reasons for this test are bogus. Of course Victor knows well the rules of the game, and of course he's going to be upset by a sudden trashing of this orderly routine. It doesn't necessarily follow that he has in mind an abstract concept of justice or moral order. Surely that would require Victor disinterestedly applying the fairness principle to a third party. Itard's real motivation is hinted at with another line of dialogue Truffaut added here: "I will test Victor's heart with a flagrant piece of injustice."

Victor reacts to the injustice with angry rebellion, fighting hard to avoid being put in the closet. It becomes a torrid wrestling match. Itard in the original report said,

Beside himself with indignation and scarlet with rage, he struggled in my arms with a violence that made all my own efforts quite useless for several minutes: finally...he threw himself on my hand and bit it long and hard.

Our onscreen Itard pulls the boy into a tight hug, his voice-over telling us "his bite filled my soul with joy." I would suggest this viscerally intense encounter is what Itard was subconsciously seeking all along. And it brings us to Truffaut's one major change to the original true story: Victor's sexuality is edited out of the film. And the boy's sexuality, in the real story, is what damaged and finally brought to a disappointing end the boy's relationship with Itard. Sex, the West's bête noire and secret sauce, was way beyond our Enlightenment hero's scientific capacities.

The real Itard produced two reports on Victor, the first coming after nine months education. This was the period of most spectacular progress and the tone of it, until the conclusion, is very upbeat. But the problem of sex was hinted at from the start. Victor at the very beginning, as we saw, needed hot baths and massages to awaken his bodily senses. Itard reports:

In addition to the use of the warm bath, I prescribed the application of dry frictions to the spinal vertebrae, and even the tickling of the lumbar regions. This last mean seemed to have the most stimulating tendency: I found myself under the necessity of forbidding the use of it, when its effects were no longer confined to the production of pleasurable emotions; but appeared to extend themselves to the organs of generation, and to indicate some danger of awakening the sensations of premature puberty.

With or without Itard's due caution, puberty soon arrives. In the final paragraph of this first report we read:

A motive very similar to the preceding has prevented me, when speaking of all the developments of young Victor's constitution, from dwelling upon the period of his puberty, which has shewn itself, for some decades [several weeks] past, in a most striking and unequivocal manner; and the first appearances of which cast considerable suspicion on the origin of certain affections of the heart, which we regard as very natural.

Itard had looked forward to Victor's puberty, believing it would result in a social efflorescence. A shy, genteel love for the fairer sex would see the boy's cultural progress soar. It might be tempting to scoff today, but I'm not sure our jaded era has much improved its understanding of this most tumultuous phase of life. We speak of Truffaut's interest in "children" and blithely extend that convenient label up to at least sixteen.

The second report, four years later, says in the introductory paragraph:

...if I had not received from you a formal request for this report, I would gladly have enveloped in a profound silence and condemned to eternal oblivion an undertaking whose outcome offers less a story of the pupil's progress than an account of the teacher's failure.

Toward the end, Itard elaborates, speaking of the boy's "signs and symptoms of a well-developed puberty":

This was the critical period which was so promising and which would doubtless have fulfilled all the hopes we had attached to it if, instead of restricting its influence solely to the senses, it had managed to stimulate his moral system equally and carry the flame of passion into his torpid heart.

As adolescence progresses, Itard speaks of a boy "tormented by the tumult of the senses" and "exasperated...since he cannot hope to satisfy his needs":

When this tumult of the senses bursts upon us, it serves no purpose to have cold baths, a soothing diet or violent exercise; his naturally sweet temper is transformed and passing swiftly from sadness to anxiety and from anxiety to fury, he turns against the things he most likes, sighs, weeps, utters shrill cries, tears his clothes and sometimes even goes so far as to scratch or bite his gouvernante. But even when he is prey to a blind and uncontrollable fury, he still feels a genuine remorse and wants to kiss the arm or hand he has bitten. When he is in this state, his pulse is raised, his face red and swollen ; sometimes blood flows from his nose and ears, which ends the outburst and postpones its repetition, especially if the haemorrhage is copious.

This is painful and tragic stuff. "Sex is the natural in man," Paglia says. Taking the boy out of nature does not remove nature from the boy. Truffaut's decision to edit sex out, though, was artistically necessary. It allowed him to keep his personal defence strategy in place and produce a wonderful love story. Besides, this vital aspect of the Victor's life belongs to a different film—one that couldn't be made in Enlightenment times, Truffaut's time, nor our own. Given Enlightenment belief in the severe danger masturbation posed, we have to assume Victor either didn't discover it or was discouraged and prevented from finding such relief.

Itard tried to prompt Victor's social use of adolescent sex energy, introducing him to the company of young women:

Instead of that burst of enthusiasm which urges one sex towards the other, he has shown only a sort of blind instinct, a rather indistinct preference which makes the society of women more agreeable to him than the company of men, but without actually experiencing any true emotion in this connection. I have seen him sometimes in the company of women, trying to find some solace for his feelings by sitting next to some young lady and gently squeezing her arms, hands and knees, carrying on thus until his restless desires were increased rather than calmed by these strange caresses; and then, unable to see an end to these painful emotions, suddenly change and angrily thrust aside she whom he had eagerly sought, only to turn to yet another in his search for fulfilment. One day, however, he took his endeavours a little further. After a few preliminary caresses, he took the lady by the hand and pulled her—though without violence—into a small alcove.

There, he seemed at a loss to know what to do next, his face and behaviour revealed a curious mixture of gaiety and sadness, boldness and uncertainty, and finally he tried to persuade the lady to caress him by offering her his cheeks; he walked round and round her thoughtfully and then threw his arms round her shoulders and hugged her tightly. This was all he did and the demonstrations of love came to an end, like all the others, with a burst of vexation which made him push away the object of his transitory desires.

Putting aside one's sympathy for the boy, it is another fascinating glimpse into untutored basic instinct. Truffaut had explored the ambivalence of early sexual feelings in The Mischief Makers. Victor's offering of his cheek to the young lady is directly analogous to his worship of rain and moon. He is in the presence of an unutterable mystery and yearns for...something. Overall, though, the boy's need for practical guidance is agonisingly stark. What makes all this so tragic is Itard's admitting it:

I did not doubt but that if I had dared to reveal the secret of his anxieties and the reason for his desires to this young man I would have reaped an incalculable benefit. But on the other hand, supposing that I could have tried such an experiment, would I not have revealed to our Savage a need which he would doubtless have sought to satisfy as publicly as his other needs and which would have led him into acts of great indecency? The fear of such an outcome inhibited my further experiments and I resigned myself to seeing my hopes disappear here, as on so many other occasions, before an unforeseen obstacle.

There is evasion in this. Victor had learned to wear clothes, go to the toilet rather than relieving himself wherever the need arose. Sex could have been assigned its time and place. But Itard can't be condemned—that's the tragedy of it. Itard was a good man, gave mightily to a loving mentorship that achieved far greater success than he allows. But the world he lived in allowed no meaningful engagement with the boy's emerging sexuality. In fact the advanced world Itard lived in—our world—was partly built on a phobic revulsion to the phenomenon. And it defeated him. Would our more bureaucratically meticulous era be any better? The phobia has only, if anything, increased. Possibly large doses of ADHD drugs would be our efficacious solution.

This essay boasts an ancient Athenian point-of-view so the obvious speculation presents: What if Victor had been engaged in an ordinary, old-fashioned pederastic pedagogy? What if the affection the boy felt for Itard included the discovery and use of his stirring sexual energy? Sex becomes not a cause of confused frustration but a profoundly deepening experience of self-discovery, pleasure, and love. Then, in the time-honoured way, the boy's move to having sex and similarly loving relationships with women would be a walk in the park—complete with borrowed top hat and cane. Itard was compelled to test Victor's heart with a pointless experiment. Perhaps he should have consulted his emotional better half, Madame Guérin, on a better way.

Itard's report includes an intriguing hint of the positive role sex might have played in Victor's education. The moment where Itard's harsh words have reduced Victor to tears—"his chest heaved with sobs, his eyes closed and tears streamed down his cheeks"—was followed, in the report, with a further observation:

I had often noticed that similar emotions, when they went so far as tears, produced a most salutary crisis and led to a sudden development of intelligence, making it possible for hitherto unsurmountable difficulties to be swiftly overcome. I had also noticed that if, at the height of this passion, I changed from reproaches to caresses and a few words of friendship and encouragement, I would produce a flood of emotion which doubled the effort I was expecting.

This direct channelling of intense emotion into successful pedagogy suggests a sexual bond may have had a similarly positive influence. Ancient Greek history is full of loved-boys striving mightily to impress their lovers. Their level of male achievement remains unmatched. As with the origin of religion, Victor's story may provide an insight. The two cultural miracles of Athens and Florence were notably infused with vigorous pederastic cultures. The conduit linking sex and stormy emotion to culture may be deliberately generous in adolescence.

Victor's classroom in The Wild Child features a prominent Enlightenment poster, a precise anatomical drawing of the human skull. It constantly poses the question: how much can science tell us about the human animal? A lot, certainly, and in the hands of the humane Dr Itard, it works wonders. Significantly, though, the clinically depicted head is cut off at the neck, neatly removing the problem of sex both Truffaut and Itard preferred not to engage. The poster reminds us of the limitations of Western science.

But Truffaut's sex-cleansed approach to loving boys does provide our film with a winning, fairy-tale finish. After the emotionally intense scene where Itard tests Victor's heart, we see the man-boy relationship assume fully-fledged proportions. Itard is laid up in bed with rheumatism. A local doctor has been called and sits at his bedside. Victor, now an adept with the manly accoutrements of top-hat and cane, brings these items to the bemused doctor and throws him out of the house. Find another man, pal—this one's taken.

Victor then chooses, directly after this, to make his escape back to nature. The timing is significant. He had freedom of movement and could have taken off at any time. The surface trigger is the boy being disappointed at missing his usual walk with Itard. Emotionally, though, and in accordance with the dictates of the genre, this is Victor's moment of doubt and fear of commitment. His attachment to Itard now outsizes his lifelong subjection to fierce Mother Nature. With Stockholm-like guilt and confusion, he takes off on an Antoine run for freedom. This is a heart-rending moment indeed. We see the tiny figure of a boy running across an open field, heading for a forest that looms like a dark tidal wave. This wave has risen from Antoine's grim grey sea, ready to swallow him whole. We see Itard at home, staring out a window into pitch-blackness, then sitting motionless in a dark room lit by a single candle. Spookily illuminated on the wall is the Enlightenment poster of the human skull. It mocks him more cruelly than a death's-head. For the first time, Itard just stares: no focus, purpose, or words. He's in a wilderness no better than the wild boy's.

In the forest, Mother punishes her errant son. Victor has lost the ability to climb a tree—his home-base, the one place he could find some self-rocking comfort. Next day he tries a compromise solution, going back to society to raid hen-houses like a self-sufficient lone wolf. It fails. Then, hiding by a roadside, he sees a horse-drawn carriage pass by and he stares after it. He's obviously remembering his carriage rides with Itard—his memory has improved prodigiously under Itard's guidance. Victor would remember leaping ecstatically from window to window to enjoy nature whizzing by, more fun than a fairground rotor ride. Itard was always in the carriage for these trips, sitting erect with his top-hat and cane, his unsmiling smile, approving, protecting, providing. In order to love nature, one must have distance from it. Turns out to be the opposite with Itard, and Victor goes home.

After Madame Guérin is rushed in to enact the joyous reunion, Itard takes his boy by the shoulders to make a touching declaration of love: "This is your home. You're no longer a wild boy, even if you're not yet a man. Victor, you're an extraordinary young man with great expectations." Under Madame Guérin's guidance, Victor heads upstairs. Halfway to the top he turns and looks almost directly into the camera. It's a reprise of the final shot in The 400 Blows. Except now the boy's dark liquid gaze stays in frame, directed not at us but at Itard. It's a solid and solemn gaze without query or uncertainty. Itard says gently, "Later we'll resume our lessons." And we iris-out to a close-up of Victor's face, his eyes remaining locked on Itard's. It's Antoine's famous shot, but here nothing freezes. And Victor keeps ascending.

 

 

^[1] Oursler, John, A Queer Reading of François Truffaut's Masterpiece, 'Jules and Jim' (2014), https://www.popmatters.com/jules-jim-truffaut-queer-reading

^[2] Francois Truffaut: Letters, ed. Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray, translated by Gilbert Adair, London, 1990

^[3] Truffaut, F, The Films in My Life, translated by Leonard Mayhew, Da Capo Press New York 1994, p 18

^[4] Chartier, J-P, Cinéastes de notre temps : François Truffaut ou l'esprit critique (Filmmakers of Our Time: François Truffaut or the Critical Spirit), (1965) 19:30

^[5] Crisp, CG, François Truffaut, Praeger Publishers Inc, New York 1972, p 28-9

^[6] Vanggard, T, Phallos: A Symbol and its History in the Male World, International Universities Press, translated by the author, New York 1972, p 56

^[7] Gillain, A, Truffaut on Cinema, trans Fox, A, Kindle Edition, Indiana, 2017

^[8] François Truffaut Letters, ed Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray, translated and edited by Gilbert Adair, Faber and Faber Limited, Great Britain 1989,  p 385

^[9] Crisp, CG, François Truffaut, Praeger Publishers Inc, New York 1972, p 57

^[10] Gillain, Anne; Fox, Alistair; Truffaut on Cinema,  Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.

^[11] Paglia, Camille, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Vintage Books, New York 1991

^[12] Antoine De Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut, translated by Catherine Temerson, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 2000, p 321.

^[13] World Film Directors Vol II 1945-1985, ed John Wakeman, The H. W. Wilson Company, New York 1988, p 1130

^[14] All report excerpts from: Malson, L, Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature, translated by Edmund Fawcett, Peter Ayrton, and Joan White, Monthly Review Press, London 1972