The Bakery Girl of Monceau

The Bakery Girl of Monceau (French: La Boulangère de Monceau) is a 1962 short film written and directed by Éric Rohmer. The film was the first of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales ("Contes moraux"), which consisted of two shorts and four feature films.

The Bakery Girl of Monceau
DVD cover
Directed by	Éric Rohmer
Written by	Éric Rohmer
Produced by	Georges Derocles Barbet Schroeder
Starring	Barbet Schroeder Claudine Soubrier Michèle Girardon
Cinematography	Bruno Barbey Jean-Michel Meurice
Release date	1962 (1962)
Running time	23 minutes
Language	French

Plot

A law student sees and falls in love with a woman he notices around his neighbourhood of Monceau, in the 8th arrondisement of Paris. He does not know how to talk to her. After he finally speaks to her, he stops seeing her around the neighbourhood, so he takes a daily walk around the area, looking for her. During his search, he acquires a habit of visiting a bakery for a snack. Over time, he develops a flirtation with the girl who works in the bakery, and he convinces her to go on a date with him. Before the date, he runs into the woman that he was searching for and is forced to choose between them.

Cast

• Barbet Schroeder: young man
• Bertrand Tavernier: young man's voiceover narration
• Claudine Soubrier: Jacqueline
• Michèle Girardon: Sylvie
• Fred Junk: Schmidt
• Michel Mardore: Client

Narrative structure

The narrative structure of The Girl at the Monceau Bakery and the other five "Moral Tales" begins with the main character (a man), who is committed to a woman, meeting and being tempted by a second woman, but renouncing her for the first woman.

Meaning of "Moral"

According to Rohmer:

My intention was not to film raw events, but the narrative that someone makes of them. The story, the choice of facts, their organization... not the treatment that I could have made them submit to. One of the reasons that these Tales are called "Moral" is that physical actions are almost completely absent: everything happens in the head of the narrator.

Most of the film is told through the narrator. The main character is played by Barbet Schroeder, but was dubbed by Bertrand Tavernier, whose voice Rohmer judged more appropriate for the very literary voice-over.

Using the word "moral" does not mean that there is a moral in the story. According to Rohmer:

So Contes Moraux doesn't really mean that there's a moral contained in them, even though there might be one and all the characters in these films act according to certain moral ideas that are fairly clearly worked out.

Also, Rohmer said:

They are films which a particular feeling is analyzed and where even the characters themselves analyze their feelings and are very introspective. That's what Conte Moral means.

Themes

• Class - like in his short film from the following year, Suzanne's Career, this film features a bourgeois main character who seduces a working-class girl for his own amusement.
• Subjectivity - the film is overtly subjective, dwelling on the protagonist's internal monologue while the camera follows him on his walks around Monceau. However, whether this subjectivity is a deliberate artistic choice or an accidental unearthing of elements of Rohmer's character is a subject of debate. Genevieve Sellier argues that Rohmer sees women as "infinitely interesting and provocative ‘others’", which flows through to his filmmaking. According to Ginette Vincendeau, Rohmer "adopts the modernist posture of the new-wave filmmaker as an ’entomologist,’ observing his wicked human specimen from an ironic, quasi-scientific distance." On the other hand, Molly Haskell argues Rohmer's treatment of women is more complex than this, and can be viewed as making fun of the ways in which men use women for their own ends.
• Love, desire, and free will - this is marked by the conflict within the protagonist. The conflict is the internalised debate of pursuing other romantic partners. They "prefer to emphasize the possibility of choice rather than the activity of it". According to James Monaco, there is an "inborn suffering" for the protagonist caused by "excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex". It is a "love based in idleness".
• Chance and coincidence - a recurring theme in many of Rohmer's films is the critical role of chance encounters in shaping the events of the film. The narrator happens to keep encountering the first woman on the street by chance, while both are out doing other things. Yet, when he begins deliberately searching for her, she can no longer be found. Only when he has stopped searching for her (the afternoon before he takes the bakery girl out on a date) does she reappear. The reason for her absence is also explained by chance; she broke her ankle after the first time they spoke.
• Temptation and fidelity - as in some of Rohmer's other works, the protagonist feels a moral duty to remain faithful to the initial object of desire. Yet, he may betray the first woman through the incomplete seduction of a second woman, "who embodies the dangerous prospect of erotic temptation". The resulting dilemma is solved with the help of a chance event which allows the protagonist to frame his final choice as one couched in morality. This also occurs in Rohmer's other films, such as Rendezvous in Paris and A Summer's Tale).

Setting

In each of the Six Moral Tales, Rohmer only filmed during the time and in the place that the film was set. There was no use of sets. This was partly to facilitate the realism which Rohmer's films are synonymous with, and partly due to lack of money. Neither did Rohmer have the funds to hire an on-set audio engineer, so this film, like Rohmer's other early works, was shot without sound. A scratch track was used to preserve the dialogue, which was subsequently re-recorded in post-production. Likewise all background noises were edited in later.

Sound

There is no nondiegetic music, only what is played in the background as part of the setting (i.e., cars, people walking by, music playing in the background at a party). Also, there is an emphasis on dialogue and frequent use of voice-over narration. The Bakery Girl of Monceau contains no music, and the only sound that interrupts the sounds in the background is that of the narrator.

External links

• The Bakery Girl of Monceau at IMDb
• Eric Rohmer: Blueprints for a Brilliant Oeuvre an essay by Ginette Vincendeau at the Criterion Collection