Talking about the “Nouvelle Vague” (New Wave) involves going back to the 50’s in France, when a number of screenwriters decided to make incursions into the direction films and changed the French cinema vision of that time. Important film directors like François Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Jean Pierre Melville or Claude Chabrol, among others, chose a natural and intimate way of understanding the cinema. They defend that the cinema’s essence was the one without artificial factors and a lot of spontaneous and improvised elements. And not only in the script or the plot, as well in the camera and the shots, the lighting, the scenario and the interpretation of the actors. Natural light and low budgets for creating moral films whose main worries were freedom and love, and always from the vision of a young person. These were the main ingredients of their succesful receipt besides their passion for Anglo- Saxo directors like Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford. A blow of fresh air in the more classical and stagnant cinema tencendies which were clearly dominated by the french literature. A great supporter of this New Wave trend was the french cinema magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, which worked before with all of these important artistic precursors.
La Boulangère de Monceau is one the six Eric Rohmer’s Moral Tales.This short 23 min film tells the story of a Law Student who is in love with a smart, blonde girl from the same neighborhood. After some street encounters and furtive looks he decides to invite her a coffee. She rejects the offer and encourages him to ask her a few days later. But a stroke of bad luck bursts into the student’s life and the encounter has no place. He wanders everyday desesperately in the parisian streets with the hope of bumping into her. In one of those walkings he finds a nice bakery which will turn into an obligated stop for buying some biscuits and entertain his daily strolls. And there he knows a shy and young bakery girl. Trying to quench his thirst of love, he organises a rendez-vous with her but when he goes out from the bakery the blonde girl appears in the street and everything changes…
Do not miss Érich Rohmer’s work, because each of his films is a beautiful step into one of the most cultural cinema tendencies of the modern time: Nouvelle Vague.
