Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Blistering performances.

"The Bakery Girl of Monceau" is the first film in Eric Rohmer's great "Six Moral Tales" film series. While it doesn't match the excellence of later films in the series , it is still a great and charming short film that serves as a nice preview to what the film series would eventually become.The film stars future filmmaker Barbet Schroeder (who went on to direct films such as "Maîtresse", "General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait", and "Koko: A Talking Gorilla") as a young law student who seems to fall in love with a young woman at a bakery-but not really. It's kind of a complicated situation in a very simple yet somewhat complicate short film. Really, you have to experience it for yourself and you'll understand what I mean by it being utterly simple yet overly complex at the same time.In the end, Rohmer offers us a charming, witty, and romantic short film that is definitely one of the best short films I've seen in a long time, even if it doesn't offer a lot to write a review about.

This is a short film by Eric Rohmer--and the first of his six so-called 'Morality Tales'. Unlike some of his later films, this one seems much more like a typical French New Wave film--with its unusual camera work (looking more like an amateur film at times), use of natural settings and unusual style."The Bakery Girl of Monceau" begins with a young man noticing a pretty lady as he walked to college. He's interested in her but they don't know each other at all--and he's working up the courage to talk to her. Eventually, he bumps into her and they talk a bit. He asks her out for coffee but she declines--but tells him she'd be willing in the future. The problem, however, is that for some time he returns to his daily route and doesn't see her. Instead, however, he becomes interested in a girl who works in a bakery. What will become of this and will the original girl return? While I know that many love Rohmer and New Wave films, this one seems like it's more a practice film than a finished product. It's incredibly mundane--to the point of almost being banal. Because of this, it's not for the casual viewer--and a film that is really impossible to rate.

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.

The first film of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, The Girl at the Monçeau Bakery, only twenty-three minutes in length, centers on the dilemma of a young man (Barbet Schroeder) forced to choose between women. The young man, a law student, is infatuated with Sylvie (Michele Girardon), a girl he sees walking on the street each morning and thinks about how to introduce himself. After making a brief connection, the girl suddenly disappears and he spends his days looking for her on the streets of Paris. His search takes him to a nearby bakery where he buys one cookie each day and begins to notice Jacqueline (Claudine Soubrier), the bakery counter girl.She is shy and withdrawn but when she finally agrees to go out with him, the first woman reappears and he is faced with a choice between a girl he hardly knows but loves and a promising relationship with a girl that has taken to him. He arrives at his choice but it is done coldly and with little regard for the feelings of the rejected woman, rationalizing this by telling himself, "My choice had been above all, moral. One represented truth, the other a mistake, or that was how I saw it at the time." The film, though a first effort, offers believable characters and conveys a strong sense of location, providing a loving glimpse at Paris in the 60s.