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Friday, April 28, 2023

LA FEMME DU BOULANGER / THE BAKER’S WIFE (1938)

Marcel Pagnol’s more or less perfect social comedy with Raimu, shaggy & middle-aged, as the new baker in a one boulangerie town, losing the will to bake after pretty, much younger wife Ginette Leclerc runs off with the hunky shepherd down the lane.  Orson Welles, a big Raimu admirer, noted how the film nicely shows the relative importance of acting to directing.  But while he’s undoubtedly right about Raimu’s greatness, he underestimates Pagnol’s simple, effective directing choices: long-take master shots, multiplane townscape compositions and restrained camera movement, all perfectly serving his material.  A whole town, a whole way of life, a whole lost homogenous system of societal checks & balances (priest, teacher, Marquis, spinster, drunk, hunter, housekeeper) coming to life without slipping into vaudeville; acquiring humanity as the villain-free story plays out ancient comic, rural encounters, the town uniting to find the wife and bring the bread oven back to life.*  And in such delightfully blunt, even rude manner.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *It makes a nice comparison with John Ford’s THE QUIET MAN/’42, which also plays the archetypal/rural eccentric card to solve a marital crisis.  But where critics tend to come down hard on Ford’s ‘stage Irish’ characterizations, Pagnol, who’s really doing much the same thing, gets a pass.  (Both film also well stocked in non-PC period-accurate attitudes.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-quiet-man-1952.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Raimu’s acting choices are startlingly fresh, often the opposite of what you expect, especially for that most maligned of comic victims, the mature cuckold.  Then, when he does get a bit of his own back, it’s done thru metaphor, and ridiculously moving.

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