The Bakery Girl of Monceau (Les Films du Losange, Studio Africa, 1963)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, December 10) my husband Charles and I put on Turner Classic Movies at 5 p.m. for two of my all-time favorite movie comedies, The Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers (1930) and Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971), followed by an oddball half-hour short from French director Éric Rohmer, The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963), and a “Silent Sunday Nights” (formerly “Silent Sunday Showcase”) showing of Yasujirô Ozu’s Dekigokoro (Passing Fancy) (1933). I won’t bother to comment on Animal Crackers or Bananas because I already have fairly recent moviemagg reviews of them (Animal Crackers is on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/02/animal-crackers-paramount-1930.html and Bananas on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/07/bananas-jack-rollins-charles-joffe.html), so instead I’ll focus on The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Passing Fancy (to use its English title). TCM was showing The Bakery Girl of Monceau along with Animal Crackers and Bananas as part of a night of films involving food in either their titles or their actual plots. The Bakery Girl of Monceau was the first of six half-hour shorts Éric Rohmer, who not only directed but wrote the original story and script, called his “Moral Tales.” It’s a well-done movie but also features a really annoying protagonist, played by future director Barbet Schroder, who narrates most of the film through a voiceover (though he does get a few lines of dialogue, mostly with his male friend Schmidt, played by Fred Junge). He spies a young, attractive blonde woman named Sylvie (Michèle Girardon) and almost immediately asks her for a date. She says she’s busy and keeps putting him off, and he gets so obsessive he practically becomes a stalker several decades early.

Then Sylvie doesn’t appear at her usual haunts, so our unnamed protagonist starts aimlessly walking the streets of Paris until he stumbles on a bakery (boulangerie). He goes in and buys a cookie from the woman who works there, Jacqueline (Claudine Soubrier), who’s also young (she insists she’s only 18, though she looks in her early 20’s) and attractive but otherwise is as totally different as Rohmer’s casting director could find. She’s dark-haired and wears her hair close-cropped (Sylvie was blonde and wore hers long), she dresses casually and develops an interest in her new customer. The narrator tells us that he’s really not interested in Jacqueline but courts her anyway as part of his revenge against Sylvie (huh?), and he tells us that he’s living almost exclusively on the sweet goods Jacqueline’s bakery serves. (He doesn’t seem to be gaining any weight – lucky him!) At the end he finally arranges to take Jacqueline to dinner at Le Dôme, one of Paris’s most legendarily fashionable restaurants, only who should show up while the narrator is on his way to his date with Jacqueline? That’s right, it’s Sylvie, who tells him she sprained her ankle and was laid up for three weeks, which is why she “disappeared” on him. Sylvie asks if he wants to have dinner with her that night, and as the movie ends our slimeball protagonist seems to be inclined to stand up Jacqueline and go out with Sylvie – though Rohmer keeps it a bit ambiguous. Frankly, it occurred to me that he should have invited Sylvie to tag along on his date with Jacqueline – but even a French director like Rohmer wasn’t going to pull anything that racy and transgressive in 1963, especially in a movie that was billed as the first of his “Six Moral Tales”!

The more we see and, regrettably, hear of Rohmer’s protagonist, the less we like him; the more he attempts to justify his conduct in his voiceovers, the more impatient we get with him and the more we actively dislike her. In that regard, and no other, The Bakery Girl of Monceau seems like a modern movie, one of those films in which the writer-director (they’re usually the same person in films like this) seems bound and determined to make sure we don’t like anybody in the movie. The character I felt sorriest for is Jacqueline, given that she really likes this guy and certainly won’t appreciate him standing her up even though we’re also convinced that’s the luckiest thing that could happen to her! And Barbet Schroeder isn’t the only future French director who appears in this film as an actor; another one, Bertrand Tavernier, shows up as an obnoxious customer in Jacqueline’s bakery who keeps hitting on her.