Eric Rohmer's The Bakery Girl of Monceau isn't a very great film- the chief liability is Barbet Schroeder, the 'Young Man' as he's called, who isn't expressive much at all, almost stilted when he has to say his lines outside of the narration which is when he does fine- but it's one that has some very solid ideas about attachment to one who is more of an unknown, and possibly unattainable. Unlike My Night at Maud's, however, Rohmer doesn't infuse a religious context, but rather that of the anxious and romantic youth, of a guy who has nothing else to do outside of his minor class work than to find a possible one-true-love walking along a particular street of Paris. He waits all the time for a woman he was at first shy to introduce himself to, and doesn't see her. His habit of getting a cookie or two from the local bakery leads him to the bakery girl, a wide-eyed girl of (only!) 18, who doesn't go out with boys but may make an exception for the charming young man.
Meanwhile, Rohmer lays on the moral dilemma- or sort of a put-on of a moral dilemma, which actually makes it more interesting- of this character while making it a surprisingly cool film directorial-wise. As great as he can be with his dialog, until this I haven't taken Rohmer as too much on the scale of being AS great as a director (not bad at all, to be sure, though a slight peg less than his old buddies Truffaut and Godard). But with this small-scale story and totally on-location scenes, he has some striking moments in just showing the young man walking on the street- jump cuts, quite amazing even in such rough form- and in the bakery, where the slightest bits of a close-up or an image of a cookie dropping mark as something significant. There's even a moment or two when the young man is with his friend early on where the camera speed seems to come close to looking like a silent film.
At only 23 minutes long, this isn't a very complex little film, and it ends sort of at a 'that's that' kind of way, but it sets a very good precedent for the rest of the 'Moral tales' to follow. It's the kind of short I'd probably like to watch again if I have a half hour to kill in a random moment in the future.
