Gentlemen Prefer Brunettes #1: The Bakery Girl of Monceau

This is the first in a series of posts I'll be writing about John G. Cawelti's theory of the blonde/brunette dichotomy in the Western, and its application to various movies, TV shows, etc. The series's title comes from the titles of Anita Loos's two famous satirical novels: "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," and "But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes." In Cawelti's theory, the formula is inverted - gentlemen prefer brunettes, but marry blondes.

Eric Rohmer was one of the great French directors to emerge from the 1960s and the Nouvelle Vague. Perhaps his most celebrated films are his six "moral tales," a set of films which all follow a common basic structure - "the story of a young man who meets up with a young girl or woman at a time when he's looking for another woman," to oversimplify using his own description of the first two tales in a 1971 interview in Film Quarterly. The first of the moral tales was La Boulangère de Monceau (1963), or The Bakery Girl of Monceau. The Criterion Collection provides a somewhat juicy blurb of the plot: "A law student... with a roving eye and a large appetite stuffs himself with sugary pastries daily in order to gain the affection of a pretty brunette who works in a quaint Paris bakery. But is he truly interested, or is she just a sweet diversion?" (Settle down, Criterion.)

In the same interview with Rohmer I quoted above, he says, "Contes Moraux doesn't really mean that there's a moral contained in them, even though... all the characters in these films act according to certain moral ideas that are fairly clearly worked out." Rohmer doesn't nail down what these moral ideas are. In fact, he says that "for all the characters... they [the ideas] are rather more vague, and morality is a very personal matter." However, by specifying that the characters in The Bakery Girl of Monceau are behaving in line with "certain moral ideas," but by not specifying what those ideas actually are, Rohmer invites us to try to figure out some of those ideas for ourselves.(1)

You may have noticed something in that Criterion blurb we read earlier - the word "brunette," which also appears in the title of this post. Well, this little analysis of The Bakery Girl of Monceau is the first of a series I'll be writing here examining an idea I'm really interested in - the blonde and brunette as signifiers of a specific view of morality. In The Six-Gun Mystique, a seminal work on the Western film, John G. Cawelti lays out "archetypical contrast between virginal blond and sexier but tainted brunette" thusly:

[There are] two different kinds of women in the Western. This dichotomy resembles the common nineteenth century novelistic dualism of blonde and brunette. The blonde, like Cooper's Alice in The Last of the Mohicans, represents genteel, pure femininity, while the brunette, like Cora in the same novel, symbolizes a more full-blooded, passionate and spontaneous nature, often slightly tainted by a mixture of blood or a dubious past. In the contemporary Western, this feminine duality shows up in the contrast between the schoolmarm and the dance-hall girl, or between the hero's Mexican or Indian mistress and the WASP girl he may ultimately marry. The dark girl is a feminine embodiment of the hero's savage, spontaneous side. She understands his deep passions, his savage code of honor and his need to use personal violence. The schoolmarm's civilized code of behavior rejects the passionate urges and the freedom of aggression which mark this side of the hero's character. When the hero becomes involved with the schoolmarm, the dark lady must be destroyed or abandoned, just as Cooper's Cora must die because her feelings are too passionate and spontaneous to be viable in the genteel world of Alice and Duncan Heyward.(2)

Linguist, philosopher and mustache delivery system Ferdinand de Saussure broke language up into three units: the sign, the signified, and the signifier. The signified is the abstract concept, represented by a word; the signifier is "the psychological imprint of the sound [of the word], the impression that it makes on our senses"; and the sign is the two together, the whole. In Cawelti's theory above, "blonde" is one concept, the signified; its signifiers are virginity, purity, gentility. "Brunette" is the other concept, the signified; its signifiers are savagery, spontaneity, danger, violence, sexuality.

With our signifiers clear, we can proceed with a consistent understanding of "blonde" and "brunette" as signs which we understand both as literal physical characteristics and as corresponding "psychological imprints" which carry (under the terms of the theory) moral weight.(3) It is this blonde/brunette dichotomy which, I feel, one can argue is one of the "moral ideas" underpinning The Bakery Girl of Monceau - both in the actions of its characters and the gaze of its director. I'll let Rohmer describe the plot of the film more fully (this is from the same 1971 interview):

[The Bakery Girl of Monceau] is about a boy who sees a girl in the street and falls in love with her but doesn't know how to become acquainted with her. He tries to follow her to find out where she lives, but loses track of her. So he makes up his mind to make a systematic search for her, and as he usually eats in a restaurant frequented by students he decides to go without dinner and use the time to look for her in the district round about. 

The young man who narrates the film, played by Barbet Schroeder, meets the blonde "girl in the street," Sylvie (Michèle Girardon), as she does her shopping. He is a law student, and she works in a gallery. They have never spoken - “I knew her only by sight,” he tells us. “Schmidt, my friend, urged me to act, but I was scared,” the young man says. Why? Because, he says, “[i]t wasn’t her style to get picked up in the street.” Sylvie performs routine adult tasks, like shopping, and walks to and from work with a purpose while the young man wanders aimlessly and agonizes over whether or not to talk to her.

How does Sylvie stack up against the blonde archetype outlined by Cawelti? In the young man's eyes, Sylvie, “carrying a basket, doing her shopping,” is a domestic, grown-up woman (despite his description of her as a "girl"). She is also a fantasy, an ideal - he knows nothing of her interests or goals, doesn't know where she lives, doesn't know anything about her background or her friends. All he knows is that she is pretty and she is grown up, holding a job, doing shopping, and having clear purpose and direction to her life. She is non-sexual, genteel, pure ("It wasn't her style to get picked up in the street").

The young man's immaturity in contrast to Sylvie is emphasized when, deciding impulsively to follow her, he suddenly and clumsily ducks behind a car to avoid her seeing him. The connotations of this childish game of hide and seek are then reinforced during their first actual conversation. In this interaction, following an accidental-or-not bump on the sidewalk, Sylvie is clearly in command, confidently responding to the young man, while the young man himself casts about wildly for what to say, seeming confused and timid. When he asks her for a date, she refuses, but says that they will undoubtedly bump into each other again.

Though the young man describes this as a "victory," he doesn't run into Sylvie again for three days, then a week. His initial optimism sprang from her open-ended refusal - in essence, no, not tonight, but ask me again next time. Sylvie's disappearance sets up a journey for our hero - the scenario implies that he is not ready to be with Sylvie yet, because he is still too immature. To attain the grown-up girlfriend, he has to grow up himself.

The brunette bakery girl Jacqueline (Claudine Soubrier) provides the young man with this opportunity. Let us return to Rohmer's plot summary (this will skip us ahead a bit here, but bear with me):

And as he gets hungry [on his patrols for Sylvie] he starts going into a baker's shop every day and buys some cakes to eat while he's exploring the area. He notices that the assistant in the shop is becoming interested in him, perhaps falling in love, and as he is getting a bit bored, he starts flirting with her. He gets caught up in the game he's playing with her and finally makes a date with her, just to see what will happen. 

At another point in this interview, Rohmer says that the characters in his moral tales "are not people who act without thinking about what they are doing. What matters is what they think about their behavior, rather than their behavior itself." However, the young man's relationship with Jacqueline is not an intellectual one. Rohmer's language above makes it clear that the young man is not interested in pursuing a serious relationship with the bakery girl - he is "bored," so he "gets caught up in the game he's playing with her." I would argue that the young man is not actually bored - instead, his ideal, Sylvie, is unattainable, so he looks for another way to express the desires that were previously directed towards Sylvie. Because the brunette Jacqueline is not the virginal ideal represented by the blonde Sylvie, however, the young man can express his desires in a less "civilized" and more dangerous way. To return to the Cawelti passage quoted earlier:

[T]he brunette... symbolizes a more full-blooded, passionate and spontaneous nature.... In the contemporary Western, this feminine duality shows up in the contrast between the schoolmarm and the dance-hall girl, or between the hero's Mexican or Indian mistress and the WASP girl he may ultimately marry. The dark girl is a feminine embodiment of the hero's savage, spontaneous side. She understands his deep passions, his savage code of honor and his need to use personal violence. The schoolmarm's civilized code of behavior rejects the passionate urges and the freedom of aggression which mark this side of the hero's character.

Let's unpack the pieces of Cawelti's theory that are especially applicable at this point in The Bakery Girl of Monceau. First, Cawelti reminds us of the signified in our brunette sign: "full-blooded, passionate and spontaneous." As we have seen, the young man's relationship with Sylvie and the characters of Sylvie and the young man themselves run counter to this - Sylvie is aloof, ironic, and detached, unwilling to break a prior plan to go on a date with the young man, while the young man himself agonizes over every move, second-guessing himself and hesitating endlessly.

Second, we have the "dark girl," in the person of Jacqueline, who is not only "spontaneous," but is the "embodiment of the hero's... spontaneous side" who "understands his deep passions." This aspect of Jacqueline's character is apparent from her first introduction, arguing with a man in a leather jacket who blows her a kiss as she says, "What an idiot!" This is no ironic, detached dance as in the young man's interaction with Sylvie on the sidewalk. When the young man asks for a cookie, Jacqueline walks up close to him, their hands grazing as she gets the cookie he indicates from the case. Unlike with Sylvie, who is either shown in a longer shot showing her head and torso or body, the camera lingers on Jacqueline's hands carrying the cookie, cutting off her head and emphasizing her breasts. Because the young man is in the bakery to purchase goods, and because Jacqueline is the one who will provide those goods, he does not agonize or dither over his choice of food or his request about taking it to go. The cookie itself is significant - rather than a relationship founded on a pure ideal, as with Sylvie, the young man's interactions with Jacqueline in the bakery live in the realm of the senses. We see this as their relationship develops - the glance of each often lingers on the other, they stand close together in the bakery, and when Jacqueline drops two cookies from the wrapping paper she holds her hand to her mouth, in surprise and dismay but also with a sexual, or at least sensual, undertone. When the young man pays for these two cookies, Rohmer shows us a close-up of his fingers counting the coins, and how his fingers touch Jacqueline's.

The young man's character development through this relationship with the bakery girl is the final piece of the theory we see here. In Cawelti's formulation, the dangerous relationship with the brunette does not keep the hero from having one with the blonde, but rather allows the hero to move on from the brunette to a successful relationship with the blonde ("the WASP girl he may ultimately marry") is possible. The young man is clear to us, if not Jacqueline, that the relationship in the bakery is a dead end. "It didn't take long to see the pretty bakery girl liked me," he says, "Call it vanity if you will, but the fact that a girl liked me seemed natural. And since she wasn't really my type, and Sylvie alone, so superior, held my thoughts - yes, it was because I was thinking of Sylvie that I accepted the advances... of the bakery girl." The young man has a confidence in his power over women we have not previously seen in his interactions with or monologues about Sylvie, and he makes it clear that despite his obvious flirtation with Jacqueline - despite his actual acceptance of her advances, in fact - he has reserved his "love," a more pure and "civilized" feeling, for Sylvie. His relationship with Jacqueline does not in the least affect his sense of himself as saving himself for Sylvie.

If, as Cawelti writes, "The schoolmarm's civilized code of behavior rejects the passionate urges and the freedom of aggression which mark this side of the hero's character," then it makes sense that the hero would need to get these traits out of his system, as it were, before embarking on a more lasting, "civilized" relationship. In The Bakery Girl of Monceau, this is established clearly when Sylvie rejects the young man's first advances. He is still too childish, too immature, too unsure of himself and too disconnected from his ability to act decisively. His relationship with Jacqueline is not only transactional about cookies - Jacqueline is also providing the young man with character development so that he can become more adult.

We see this sensual/sexual relationship with the bakery girl develop, first through one cookie, then two, then an entire armful of pastries. First he eats his cookies offscreen; then, in front of us; finally, with Jacqueline herself. At last, he makes the logical move (they are getting closer and close, after all) from pastries to Jacqueline. Running into her on the street, he pulls her into a side street and asks for a date. In contrast to the earlier scene where he asks Sylvie for a date - in the middle of a crowded sidewalk, in the light, surrounded by people and noise, with the young man unbalanced by his feelings and everything around him - this scene takes place in partial shadow, with no one else around. The camera angle places the young man above Jacqueline, and his hand is against the wall as he leans over her.

When the bakery girl is reluctant to agree on the date, he reaches out for her hand and holds it. His manner of speaking and his body language almost suggest that of a parent speaking with a shy or recalcitrant child. The young man does not see the bakery girl as a woman, certainly not as an object of his love like the professional and polished Sylvie. Instead, she is young, with a temporary job in a bakery - someone he can use to advance his own sense of self and then move on from. He almost literally strong-arms her into agreeing to the date. Photo #3 at the start of this post shows how he places both his hands firmly on her shoulders, close to her neck, appearing to lean his weight on her as he asks if she will go with him to the movies on Saturday; when she hesitates again, he caresses her neck, pinching her skin and telling her what time and where they will meet. When she asks if she needs to dress up, he says, "No, you're fine as you are." Jacqueline has no agency in this scene - she doesn't need to dress up, because she is not the reason the young man wants the date. "Call it vanity if you will" - I wouldn't call his pursuit of Jacqueline vanity, but it is completely self-absorbed and for his own benefit. He has already put aside his love for Sylvie; Jacqueline serves only to help him process the feelings and desires that have no place in those more genteel interactions to prepare him for that more pure and civilized relationship. And as Rohmer himself indicates, the young man makes his date with Jacqueline "just to see what will happen," describing it as a flippant gesture, one which never takes Jacqueline's feelings into account.

Ultimately, the date with the bakery girl never happens.(4) At the end of the film, the young man has traded his light-colored suit for a more professional, adult, dark one (see the last photo at the start of this post). Rohmer again:

[J]ust as he's going to meet [Jacqueline for their date], he comes across the first girl, the one he'd seen right at the beginning of the story, who lives just opposite the baker's but had sprained her ankle and couldn't go out, which is why he hadn't seen her. She had seen him go in there every day, but, thinking that he knew where she lived, she assumed that he just went in there so that she would notice him. She doesn't know anything about the girl in the bakery.

As we learn about Sylvie's injury, we see that the young man's leg is placed in front of his body, close to Sylvie. He is confident, collected. Now it is Sylvie who has been watching him, unable to act, wondering what he was thinking. They go on their own date, ready to embark on their relationship as hero and heroine, while the bakery girl disappears. When the young man and Sylvie go into the bakery together - to buy a baguette, not childish cookies - she is nowhere to be seen. She is erased. As Cawelti writes, "When the hero becomes involved with the schoolmarm, the dark lady must be destroyed or abandoned." In The Bakery Girl of Monceau, the "dark lady" is not only abandoned as a consequence of a relationship with the blonde - she is abandoned as a prerequisite to that relationship. Only by having and then abandoning his relationship with the dangerous, sexual Jacqueline can the young man be adequately prepared to begin a relationship with the genteel and pure Sylvie. 

In the 1971 interview, Rohmer concludes his description of The Bakery Girl of Monceau by saying, "It's a very slight story, an anecdote really." It is a very slight story, though a fairly nasty one. Dave Kehr noted in the New York Times that the film "display[s] an appreciation for male cruelty and female passive-aggression," but it doesn't, really - just male cruelty. Passive-aggression implies agency, and while Sylvie undoubtedly has more agency than the bakery girl, both are simply tools that the film uses to construct its hero, tools that have deep roots in our conception of the blonde and brunette, the dark and the light, and the good and the bad in love and lust.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Gentlemen Prefer Brunettes: Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 thriller Vertigo.

NOTES

(1) And here, to be safe, is the disclaimer I would put on any textual analysis - I plan to argue that my diagnosis and analysis of some of the moral ideas that might be underpinning this film are both valid, but I am not going to argue that they were intended by Rohmer or are exclusive of other interpretations.

(2) Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, 75-76. I'm quoting Cawelti's description of this duality at length here because I will be returning to it in each subsequent edition of the Gentlemen Prefer Brunettes series.

(3) I am sure someone who understands Saussure better than I do could say that this breakdown of the sign, signified, and signifier is overly simplistic, or maybe even wrong. Seeing as how the biggest effect most of the critical theory I learned in grad school had on me was messing up my hair as it flew overhead, they'd probably be right. However, I think that Saussure's terms (as I've laid them out, at least - you can read Saussure's original explanation here) are incredibly useful for understanding what we do when we find, interpret, and explain motifs and symbols in texts, and by golly I will continue using them to lay out that process whether or not they have fuller meanings in other contexts. Don't @ me, Saussure nerds. 

(4) While this is because the young man encounters Sylvie again, he tells us that he almost blew off the bakery girl anyway, only going because "none of my friends was around." Great guy.