[Cuteness] is part of [Truffaut's] film-making psyche these days (all those cozy "inside" references in The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid), and it is one of the reasons why The Wild Child, which is generally interesting, is not as good as it might have been. The visual aim of the film is not to look like 1798, but to look like an old film, a cute objective rather than an artistic one: the many uses of the iris, the tone of the black and white which is almost like 1920s sepia, the management of the crowd scenes like those in old operettas, all these are consciously quaint devices.

The best element is the straightforward narrative, which is truly simple, not quaintly so. (pp. 15-16)

The film's viewpoints are mixed—sometimes objective, sometimes the boy's or the doctor's—and this mixture doesn't help a cumulative sense of the unhusking...