La mujer del panadero

It is an incredibly romantic poem that has been made into a silver screen story. In Urdu, there is a type of poem - Ghazal - the song that lovers sing when they are apart. This movie is one which could be equated to it.

It is a village - a very small one - in which no two persons - either gender - sees eye to eye - and that includes the two who should - the Vicar and the teacher - who greatly dislike each other, and of course there is a great sinner there, the marquis of the territory, who has four 'nieces' living with him. Of course all know, and he too doesn't hide the fact about the relationship between him and his supposedly nieces. But he is incorrigible despite all the exhortation by the vicar (and he does explain why, and one can sympathise with his human - well one can call frailties).

In this village arrives a middle age and not too handsome baker (Raimu) with his lovely and young (enough to be his daughter, as he tells her later) wife, Aurelie (Ginette Leclerc). Her love/romance-less life is awakened by a young and handsome shepherd Dominique (Charles Moulin) and she elopes with him. It all happens quickly and the rest of the movie deals with the suffering of the husband and the behaviour of the villagers. First natural, contemptuous and contemptuously sarcastic towards the cuckolded husband, the matters change, when they find that the baker has stopped baking. With the 'daily Bread' now gone, the only way is to search and bring the wife back to him, and in this effort all the enemies (including the Vicar and the teacher) bury their enmity. However that, and the ending is only consequential. The main thing that makes this exquisite is the pain and suffering of the cuckolded husband - and his feeling towards the wife that has betrayed him (and his still care, and support for her) - and even though he expresses his bitterness - in the end, allegorically, but not hidden to the audience - on or off screen - but still he is ready to forgive and forget - despite the wound inflicted - unlike any of the others - including the Vicar, who does preach the 'First stone' principle, but prefers that it - the confession and pardon of the sinner-ess, if caught - takes place in some one else's vicarage, not his. Only one who probably understand and really sympathises is the devil's disciple of the area, the Marquis, but as he has hinted, he too suffered from the affliction, or may be lack of it - though it is mentioned as love of flesh by Vicar - but really it was much more subtle and beautiful. The story, a few times might seem moving slow - especially at may places where it was almost monologue of the husband - but really can't be sped up - else it would lose the poetic quality - and added to it, it has some very witty dialogues - a few could be (and was, by the Vicar), blasphemous. Came across the movie just by chance - and I wonder why this doesn't figure in the "Movies before you die" lists.

In a town where the priest and the teacher argue, where neighbors wrangle because this one's trees as throwing shade on the other's giant cabbages, where no one talks to anyone else for reasons their grandfathers didn't remember, where the last baker hanged himself, there's a new baker in town. It's Raimu, and his bread is magnificent. His wife, pretty Ginette Leclerc promptly runs off with a handsome shepherd. Raimu immediately goes to pieces and the town is split between mocking him, calling her a tramp and worrying about where they'll get bread.

One of the stories about this movie is that Marcel Pagnol wanted Joan Crawford for the role of the baker's wife. She declined on the grounds that she didn't speak French. The other story is that after the war, Orson Welles asked Pagnol for an introduction to Raimu. He was told Raimu was dead and wept. I can understand the reaction. Raimu is so clueless and sad and yet very funny in the role. Any man who has had a woman he loves leave him without any warning can sympathize, even as he looks at Raimu and laughs.

Raimu could fill this movie by himself, yet there are other good roles: the local nobleman who has seven young women living in his chateau; the priest who mouths platitudes without understanding anything; the women who gossip and wrangle among themselves; the old man who has found Mlle Leclerc, but has to tell the story in his own, endless way.

I'd like to have seen Miss Crawford in the role. She would have aced the physical acting, and if she couldn't be coached in the thirty or forty words the character speaks, they could have looped her sides. No one could have replaced Raimu in this magnificent, sad comedy.

This is a movie with a very warm and pleasant atmosphere. It has a childish innocence over it, like basically all these typical genre movies from the '30's seem to have.

It's atmosphere, story and characters make this a very pleasant and entertaining movie to watch. It has a very simple concept, in which a French baker's wife run of with a shepherd, after the first night they moved in to a small village, in the middle of the countryside. After this the baker refuses to make bread anymore. The villagers of course want their daily fresh bread so they together come up with a plan to get her back to the bakery. It all sounds very simple but thanks to its fine storytelling from director Marcel Pagnol it all works out real well. There also is of course more to the story, courtesy of some fine input from the movie its characters and actors portraying them.

It's a well cast movie, with French character actor Raimu in the main lead. The other cast members all have some very characteristic look over them, the way only the French can look. I'm not too happy about the casting of Ginette Leclerc though. She is supposed to be a very pretty woman in the movie but just look at the way Leclerc look...she is no natural beauty. Or perhaps her looks just were the idea of a true beauty, in the France of the 1930's.

It takes a while for the movie to pick up its pace and the movie also tends to drag on a bit in its middle part but in the many parts that the movie finds its right pace, the movie is a great one. It's a real enjoyable comedy, that is not the type of comedy that has some hilarious moments that will make you laugh out loud in it but it's more the type of comedy that tries to constantly entertain. It doesn't fail at that, thanks to the movie its very pleasant atmosphere, simplistic story and likable characters. Especially the movie its last halve, in which the villagers start to undertake action, is just great.

A fun and warm little movie.

8/10

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My favourite of all the Pagnol films, including the recent ones, due to the timeless, moving performance by the great Raimu as the lovelorn baker. The French stars of that period have never been surpassed as character actors, and for this film the writer was a great character author.

French director Marcel Pagnol had a unique way of composing his films. His best example is September 1938's "The Baker's Wife." Pagnol's style of filmmaking consisted of full shots of all his characters who are captured within the frame. He has them conversing in long takes without resorting to any cutaways. Despite his spare scenes, Pagnol was able to convey his message, displaying an entire range of human emotions to propel his plot forward.

"It is a slice of French life from the past that is timeless in its telling," praised film reviewer Chanan Stern. "It is one of those movies that can and should be watched many times." Pagnol, a famous playwright in the 1920s before turning to film in the early 1930s, is mostly known for his 'Marius' trilogy, especially 1932's "Fanny." Adapting one of the stories from Jean Giono's 1932 novel 'Blue Boy,' "The Baker's Wife" follows baker Aimable (Raimu), who's a recent arrival to a French village. He sets up a bakery shop to replace a recently shuttered one. All the villagers love his bread, including the Marquis (Fernand Charpin), who sends his shepherd (Robert Vattier) to fetch 30 loaves every week. The shepherd attracts the eye of Aurelie (Ginette Leclerc), the baker's attractive young wife. She and the shepherd slink out of town, much to the distress of her husband. He gets drunk and stops making bread. A catastrophe is in the making as the querulous townspeople, who always bicker amongst themselves, agree on one thing and that is to bring back the baker's wife so they can buy their daily bread.

"The Baker's Wife" was a make-busy project for Pagnol's film crew after a previous production using his studio was cancelled, leaving a two-month gap until the next movie was scheduled to be shot. Pagnol had an unusual habit of shaping his stories on the personalities of his actors. He lived with his cast and film crew during the duration of the shoot, ate his meals alongside them, and played games between setups. The director/writer was so familiar with his actors he would shape and rewrite his scripts daily on the basis of their mannerisms and temperament. The nexus of "The Baker's Wife" was actor Raimu, who was Cesar in the 'Marius' trilogy. Raimu had to be coxed to play the baker after he and Pagnol had a falling out. Actress Ginette Leclerc stepped in as an intermediary between the two to patch things up. Raimu ended up giving an unforgettable performance reflecting the immense pain he experiences by his wife running off with another man. "The poignancy comes from the situation - this poor man, who so easily makes himself lovable on screen, is broken in front of us," notes film reviewer Erik Beck. Orson Welles, impressed by Raimu's performance, called him "the greatest actor in the world."

"The Baker's Wife" was acknowledged as the Best Foreign Film of the year by both the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics. The Pagnol film is included in the '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die' book.