Kings of Pastry (D.A. Pennebaker & Chris Hegedus, 2009): USA, UK, France, Netherlands

Review by Lauren Sousa.  Viewed online.

I appreciate a documentary that makes its main goal education or propaganda (which is not, itself, a bad thing; even a sign that says “Brush Your Teeth” at a dentist’s office is propaganda). That kind of documentary can be well-done, well thought-out, intelligent, and informative. it can, like all film, raise questions that its audience had perhaps not thought before to ask.

Sometimes, though, a documentary comes along with the same apparent goals and structure of a narrative feature: to tell a story with clear stakes and a variety of characters with whom the audience develops some level of rapport. That appears to be largely the point of Kings of Pastry: certainly, to show us a somewhat obscure test of skills of which we might not of thought before, but also to tell us the story of people with whom we come to sympathize.

Those people are Jacquy, a baking professor at the School of Pastry Arts in Chicago; Phillipe Rigollot, a French pastry chef, and Regis Lazard, in his second go-round. They are three of sixteen contestants at the 2007 exam and competition for the title of M.O.F., or Best Craftsman in France in Pastry Arts, an exam of sorts for the best pastry chefs in the land, who are awarded a blue, white, and red striped collar to designate their acheivement. It is not partficularly clear if there will be much consequence for the men besides a large measure of pride or sought-after skills, but that is not a question with which the film is particularly concerned. Rather, it is concerned with the building of suspense over whether the three men, all of whom have demonstrated their considerable skills on camera before the three-day event during which their wits and all of their skills in patteserie will be tested.

It would be a great event around which to structure a narrative feature, with traditional character development and a fictional building of stakes, as the events are well-organized as the film follows each character through a few days of his normal life, the weeks of rehearsal and planning before the big day, a time trial for the actual event, and the M.O.F. competition itself. Characters are develpped through their actions, confessionals, and the confessionals of their significant others. It is perhaps this aspect of the film’s true naturalism that makes it so appealing; of course there is the drama, but it is not prescribed in any wsay; a complication late in the game is truly harrowing because neither the subjects nor their documentarians have any control over the results of the disaster.

The film’s only weakness is its music, which sounds like a stock version of “French music” and doesn’t always seem appropriate

Overall, it’s a refreshing palette cleanser, filling a need for both a drama and a documentary at the same time, with the added bonus of simply beautiful sugar arts on the aesthetic side.