The Bakery Girl of Monceau (French: La boulangère de Monceau) is a 1962 short film written and directed by Éric Rohmer, officially the first of his Six Moral Tales.
A law student (Barbet Schroeder)note becomes infatuated with the beautiful, blonde Sylvie (Michèle Girardon), who he passes on the sidewalk every day.
One day they bump into each other and finally talk. Since the ice is now broken he decides to ask her out on a date the next time he sees her. But when he goes to look for her in the neighborhood where she lives, she's nowhere to be found. To pass the time he goes to a small bakery where the shy brunette Jacqueline (Claudine Soubrier) works. Stopping by the shop each day after a fruitless search for Sylvie, he's convinced that Jacqueline has fallen in love with him and finally asks her out. But on his way to pick up Jacqueline, he meets Sylvie again.
Rejected by film festivals and theaters, it didn't get a formal theatrical release until 1974, long after Rohmer had established himself as a filmmaker.
This film contains examples of:
- Betty and Veronica: Inverted. The Betty figure (Jacqueline) sidetracks the narrator from his quest for Veronica (Sylvie).
- Comfort Food: The protagonist makes a habit of buying cookies as consolation when he doesn't see Sylvie.
- Narrator: The law student narrates in first person.
- No Name Given: The protagonist and narrator, the young law student, is not named.
- One-Book Author: This was Claudine Soubrier's only film.
- Same Language Dub: Fellow director Bertrand Tavernier
provides the first person voiceover narration, because Rohmer decided that Barbet Schroeder didn't quite have a sophisticated-enough voice. - Secondary Character Title: Jacqueline doesn't really get developed very much as a character.
- Stalker with a Crush: The protagonist, though at the end we learn Sylvie has been keeping tabs on him as well.
- Starving Student: The narrator, figuratively and literally.
- Stood Up: The film ends with the protagonist blowing off his date with Jacqueline to be with Sylvie.
