THE BAKER'S WIFE Movie Review

La Femme du Boulanger

In a small French village, the new baker's arrival is greeted with great anticipation by the locals, since the previous baker's suicide has left the population breadless. The baker (Raimu) turns out to be quite talented, but his lovely wife (Ginette Leclerc) decides that not everything about him is completely satisfying, and she promptly runs off with her new lover, a local shepherd. Despondent, the baker turns to drink and, worst of all for the villagers, loses interest in his craft. It is up to the townspeople, therefore, to reunite the pair if they ever expect to get a decent loaf of bread again. The Baker's Wife has charmed audiences worldwide for 60 years; not only was it a rare foreign language hit in American theatres, but luminaries such as Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, and Albert Einstein extolled its virtues in the most grandiose of terms. The Baker's Wife is pretty irresistible, yet the film's strength derives not from the grandiosity of either theme or style, but from the very simplicity of its conception. Pagnol's ability to let us comfortably soak up his little village's atmosphere, allowing us to virtually move in for a couple of hours, is part of the secret; but it's the central performance of Raimu as the baker that is the real yeast in this recipe. Raimu may not actually have been, as Welles claimed,” the greatest screen actor of all time,” but while watching him balance comedy and pathos in the perpetually enchanting performance he gives here, you just might be inclined to agree.

NEXT STOP … The Fanny Trilogy, The Well-Digger's Daughter, Harvest

1933 101m/B FR Raimu, Ginette LeClerc, Charles Moulton, Charpin, Robert Vattier; D: Marcel Pagnol; W: Marcel Pagnol; C: Georges Benoit; M: Vincent Scotto. New York Film Critics Awards ‘40: Best Foreign Film. VHS INT, MRV, DVT