There’s a new baker in town. His name is Aimable Castanier (Raimu) and his first name fits him like an oven mitt. Not only do the residents of a tiny pre-war French village find Aimable easy to get along with, but, more importantly, they love his bread.
Their joy over Aimable’s pain is rudely interrupted when Aimable’s very young wife Aurélie (Ginette Leclerc) runs off with a handsome shepherd. Devastated, Aimable stops baking. The villagers feel sorry for Aimable and all, but they feel even more sorry for themselves – his bread was that good! That’s when they hatch a plan to bring her back.
Charming, funny, with dialogue that ranges from the absurdly comic to the profoundly philosophical, TBW is part welcoming warm breeze and part sudden chilling gust of wind.
A comedy of opposites – the old and the young, the logical and the spiritual, the decadent and the virtuous – TBW is, ultimately, a story about how men put aside their petty squabbles and join together to reassert their dominance over the fairer sex.
And the squabbles are not only petty, but, sometimes, they are so silly that they are a mystery even to those engaging in them.
Take the opening scene. The teacher of the village has just dismissed his students and has locked up for the day. Outside waiting for him is a villager named Pétuge. He has a favour to ask. Tipping his hat to his learned friend, Pétuge asks the teacher if he could tell a man named Casimir – who owns the local bar – that there is a dead dog in his well and that, if he doesn’t take care of it, the water he’ll serve his customers will make them all sick.
Why doesn’t Pétuge tell Casimir? Simple – his family has been feuding with Casimir’s family going back generations. Even though Pétuge’s father had no idea what they were feuding about, and Pétuge, himself, has no idea what he is supposed to be feuding about, the feud, nonetheless, lives on. The teacher thinks they’re a bunch of idiots, but Pétuge tells him it’s all about pride. It’s a nice moment where the teacher’s arrogance is exposed by Pétuge. If he hadn’t felt so superior to the ‘less educated’ villagers and had given it a bit more thought, Pétuge would not have had to school him. Nonetheless, the teacher agrees to pass the message on to Casimir.
From one squabble to another we go, as two farmers bicker about elm trees and gardens and the teacher gets into a far more profound back and forth with the village priest about Joan of Arc and whether God exists at all or are we all just properly civilized animals with better brains.
Before long, it seems like the whole town is caught up in an increasingly twisting tangle of feuds.
When we first meet Aimable, he is caught among a curious crowd of villagers who are quick to question his bread baking skills. He goes to great lengths to assure them that he knows what he is doing. What follows is interesting. Somehow, his wife’s beauty gets compared to the quality of Aimable’s bread. The village men are practically drooling over her. They agree that if his bread is half as good as his wife is beautiful, then it will be wonderful bread indeed.
That connection, of course, is crucial – Aimable bakes his bread for her, not the village. It’s not wrong to say that he derives some pleasure from the fact that other men desire his wife – just like he derives plenty of pleasure from the villagers’ desire for his bread. Though Aimable truly does love and cherish Aurélie, in some ways, he sees her not unlike he sees the bread he bakes – as objects under his control that establish his worth as a man and elevate him above the average villager.
We next meet the Marquis (Fernand Charpin). Well dressed and well off, he sees himself as a sort of king of the village. He is also open about the decadent life he leads with 4 young women of “easy virtue.” The shepherd, who so entrances the baker’s wife that she runs off with him, also happens to be employed by the Marquis. Naturally, the Marquis will need more bread than the others and his overindulgence in food and sex is a cold that his shepherd will soon catch.
The scene where sparks first fly and a blaze is lit between Aurélie and the shepherd is an amusing bit that once again cements the connection between Aimable’s bread and Aimable’s wife.
TBW belongs to Raimu. Comic, humble, tragic, a bit scary and even tender, Raimu is all of these things and then some. An older man with a face that, somehow, manages to look its age and yet is able to communicate a fragile innocence and youthful naivete, he makes us love, like, pity and hate him depending on where we find ourselves in the film.
Aimable’s relationship with his beloved Aurélie is as much of an example of opposing forces somehow learning to live together in a kind of phony harmony as is the petty squabbles between the villagers and the teacher and the Marquis bickering with the priest. Aimable and Aurélie’s village is their home. The villagers’ home is their village. Both function on the surface despite tension and turmoil busily bubbling underneath. Maybe they function because of, not despite, these tensions. But function for whom?
Aimable and Aurélie are opposites in age – his face is all wrinkled and weighed down by droopy skin. His eyes are cushioned by big, puffy bags. On his head sits a sparse plot of thinning hair that looks like a small bush that is in desperate need of some landscaping. Aurélie, meanwhile, is fresh faced, curvy and erotically charged. Opposites can also be found in other areas of their relationship.
Aurélie craves romantic and sexual fulfillment whereas the only heat Aimable cares about is the type that comes out of his oven. Baking and the commerce of selling his baked goods is all that seems to stick in that doughy head of his.
Aimable and Aurélie’s relationship is more parent-child than husband-wife. And the only one who seems to be aware of it is Aurélie. Aimable is so clueless that he truly believes Aurélie has zero interest in anything even approaching physical gratification. Hilariously, he mistakes Aurélie’s disinterest in him as a lover for her disinterest in lovemaking entirely – his self-absorption is that staggering.
Yet, and this is what complicates and renders TBW such a problematic pleasure to watch, Raimu is such a gifted and endearing performer that this cluelessness and, let’s be honest, cruelty present in Aimable, that confines Aurélie to a loveless marriage and denies her of her own full self, is somewhat softened and buried. It is softened by Raimu’s charm and likeability. It is buried by his expert comic bumbling and the real pain hiding underneath that he so effortlessly expresses. Yet, it is not softened or buried enough not to see and feel it.
This is a town where men make and enforce the rules. It is a town where both the educated, free thinking intellectual and the close minded, superstitious religious authority figure can join forces – literally, at one point, when the teacher gives the priest a piggyback – all in the name of keeping female autonomy and female sexual desire under lock and key.
Not exactly a unique town – certainly not in 1938. Yet, it’s almost as if Pagnol has dropped a rat in a cardboard box and then decorated it with the most beautiful wrapping paper.
Was he deliberately critiquing male power and the ways in which it can bridge almost any social, economic or religious gap? Or was he simply telling a witty little tale about what happens when a village is deprived of its favourite food item? I can’t say for certain, but the structure seems to suggest the former.
Most of the scenes that lead up to Aurélie and the shepherd running off together feature male villagers squabbling. Then, once the amorous couple run off and a depressed Aimable stops baking, these same men – who just a short while ago were at each other’s throats – put aside their differences and come together to track down Aurélie. Even two bickering farmers – locked in a bitter dispute over an overgrown elm tree – make peace and are even seen singing songs together as they return from a failed attempt to locate Aurélie. They are drunk, yes, but the day was dedicated to bringing back one of the village’s wayward women.
Whether he knew it or not, Pagnol has fashioned a revealing look at the way men – and their woman co-conspirators – disregard female self-realisation in favour of maintaining “order” and satisfying their own selfish needs. Never do the men consider Aurélie’s action as anything other than an injury to Aimable and – because of their love of his bread – to them, as well. Never does it occur to them that Aurélie might have had good reason to run off with the shepherd. And, the funny thing is – she does!
As Pagnol shows us, Aimable is not only too old for Aurélie, but he is too obsessed and consumed with baking to properly fulfill her needs. The one time Pagnol shows the mismatched couple in bed together, Aimable is ranting about the economics of breadmaking. Shortly thereafter, the shepherd appears outside their bedroom window to serenade Aurélie. As she swoons, a still completely clueless Aimable thinks the romantic song the shepherd is singing in Italian is meant as a tribute to his bread baking skills. The girl is dying for romance and the kind of ecstasy only two bodies tangled together can bring and all her husband can think about is the only thing he ever thinks about – his bread. It’s all about him all the time – even a bold and very obvious attempt to seduce his wife! Remember, earlier in the film, even his wife’s beauty was talked about in relation to Aimable’s bread. Bread, bread, bread! In other words, Aimable, Aimable, Aimable!
No surprise then that the film is called “The Baker’s Wife.” Aurélie and anything she is, desires or does to fulfill that desire only matters because it happens in the world of Aimable. And that is why no one even considers that Aurélie might have actually done the right thing – if only, possibly, in the wrong way.
Stylistically, Pagnol is all bare bones – no frills point and shoot. No fancy camera angles or movements to be found. There is nothing approaching atmospheric lighting and the editing is all done in an unfussy manner that seeks not to call any attention to itself. No complaints there – it works as the terrific dialogue, remarkable performance by Raimu and the many memorable villagers give us plenty to think on and enjoy.
In TBW, humour and heartache are torn off and handed out in equal measure. Though a bit bloated at 134 mins, one can forgive Pagnol for falling under Raimu’s spell and not trimming, for example, his otherwise bravura showcase in the town centre when, drunk and despondent, Aimable hilariously melts down as the concerned – as well as entertained – villagers look on.
I first saw TBW on a crappy VHS copy where the whites were so blown out that they obscured a good half of every subtitle. I was in my early to mid 20s at the time and, as I sit here today, I can’t recall reacting as much to the obvious sexist attitudes of the villagers – Aimable most of all.
Same movie, different man.
