Sunday, February 21, 2010

The Bakery Girl of Monceau, 1963


I just wrote a note last month about the death of master director Eric Rohmer. A beautiful short film delicate, perfect and inspiring is this masterpiece; simple, and jazzy, the first of the “Moral Tales” shows the basis of what would become the Eric Rohmer style: unfussy naturalistic shooting, ironic first-person voice-over, and the image of the “unknowable” woman. A law student (played by producer and future director Barbet Schroeder) with a roving eye and a large appetite stuffs himself full of sugar cookies and pastries daily in order to garner the attentions of the pretty brunette who works in a quaint Paris bakery.

The film is about the simple and complex decisions a young man has to make like which girl to go out with, the emotional content is perfect no need to dramatize, the process is in a sense a delight. Just like the wonderful scene where the young man asks the pastry girl to join him eating a pastry. This is one  the great scenes I know about eating.

The CD has a wonderful set of interviews with Eric Rohmer that are lessons in cinema as well as great stories about how one of the masters of “French New Wave” started making films, The interviewer is his friend and producer of his movies a great director himself Barbet Schroeder.

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