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| The Bakery Girl of Monceau | |
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 DVD cover | |
| Directed by | Éric Rohmer |
| Written by | Éric Rohmer |
| Produced by | Georges Derocles Barbet Schroeder |
| Starring | Barbet Schroeder Claudine Soubrier Michèle Girardon |
| Cinematography |
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Release date |
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Running time | 23 minutes |
| Language | French |
The Bakery Girl of Monceau (French:La Boulangère de Monceau) is a 1962short film written and directed byÉric Rohmer.[1] The film was the first of Rohmer'sSix Moral Tales ("Contes moraux"), which consisted of two shorts and four feature films.
A law student sees and falls in love with a woman he notices around his neighbourhood of Monceau, in the8th 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.
The narrative structure ofThe 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.
According to Rohmer:
My intention was not to film raw events, but thenarrative 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.[2]
Most of the film is told through the narrator. The main character is played by Barbet Schroeder, but was dubbed byBertrand 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:
SoContes 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.[3]
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 whatConte Moral means.
In each of theSix 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-setaudio engineer, so this film, like Rohmer's other early works, was shot without sound. Ascratch track was used to preserve the dialogue, which was subsequently re-recorded in post-production. Likewise all background noises were edited in later.[6]
There is nonondiegetic 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.
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