The Bakery Girl of Monceau (Rohmer, 1963)
My first Rohmer film the first Moral Tale is an interesting and quite sad exploration of male vanity and fickleness. In telling the story of the perfect woman versus the woman on the side, Rohmer eviscerates a certain bourgeois morality and sexual class system.
It also becomes quite hard to watch, as the young man is revealed to be steadily more cold and callous. In some ways it reminded me of Cheever's "Goodbye, My Brother" in it's use of the unreliable narrator and slow reveal.
Within the New Wave, this early Rohmer is more Truffaut than Godard, the literary expressed as the literary rather than transformed into the cinematic. That is not a criticism, however, so much as a different style and one that works beautifully here. It is up there with Antoine et Colette for the best New Wave shorts I have seen.
My first Rohmer film the first Moral Tale is an interesting and quite sad exploration of male vanity and fickleness. In telling the story of the perfect woman versus the woman on the side, Rohmer eviscerates a certain bourgeois morality and sexual class system.
It also becomes quite hard to watch, as the young man is revealed to be steadily more cold and callous. In some ways it reminded me of Cheever's "Goodbye, My Brother" in it's use of the unreliable narrator and slow reveal.
Within the New Wave, this early Rohmer is more Truffaut than Godard, the literary expressed as the literary rather than transformed into the cinematic. That is not a criticism, however, so much as a different style and one that works beautifully here. It is up there with Antoine et Colette for the best New Wave shorts I have seen.
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