The great cream-puff makers of France get their due in Kings of Pastry

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      A documentary by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. In English and French with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Friday to Sunday, December 17 to 19, and Wednesday and Thursday, December 22 and 23, at the Pacific Cinémathí¨que

      Rarefied in a different way than D. A. Pennebaker’s other documentary subjects—Bill Clinton (The War Room), Bob Dylan (Don’t Look Back), and Jimi Hendrix (Jimi Plays Monterey), to name a few—the great cream-puff makers of France get their due in Kings of Pastry.


      Watch the trailer for Kings of Pastry.

      Working with his long-time film and life partner, Chris Hegedus, Pennebaker takes his usual fly-on-the-wall approach, this time following French expat Jacquy Pfeiffer from Chicago—where he runs a pastry school—to a big annual baking contest back home. Winners of the Meilleur Ouvrier de France (or MOF) get a tricouleur collar for their agonizing efforts, plus the odd pep talk from president Nicolas Sarkozy. The Alsace-born Pfeiffer has previously competed and lost, and this time he has help from cooking-school partner Sebastien Canonne, who already wears the ribbon.

      Once we get to Lyon, we meet some of the other 15 would-be MOFos (all of them men) and perhaps start to wonder why the filmmakers focused so relentlessly on Pfeiffer for the movie’s first quarter. He’s an amiable but rather bland personality, and it takes a while for more compelling chefs to emerge, so the drama builds slowly. Tension does mount, however, especially when everyone is working on elaborate sugar sculptures that resemble the after-dinner fantasies of Dr. Seuss.

      Actually, most of these creations border on kitsch, and all are extremely fragile; the contest is about luck and external conditions as well as skill. (“Egalité, Fraternité, Humidité” could be the MOF motto.) If the film has a fault, other than vagueness in some of the cooking particulars, it’s that its hand-held digital-video images don’t do a lot to make the food look appetizing. But in the end, the tale is about dreams, not dessert.

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