Kings of Pastry is
a good film and will especially appeal to anyone interested in baking and food
competitions. It focuses on the prestigious
contest among French pastry chefs for the highest honors in that field. Like Frederick Wiseman’s Boxing Gym of the same year, Kings
of Pastry compels comparisons with “reality TV;” particularly regarding the
ways in which direct cinema set the
stage for the genre and how “reality TV” is in many ways a bastardization of direct cinema. While Wiseman’s film is a deliberate
refutation of “reality TV” techniques, Pennebaker’s shows many concessions to
it; as in the use of identifying captions.
While the film works fine and is interesting, aesthetically it doesn’t achieve
much. I have nothing but admiration for
Pennebaker for still being so active well into his 80s, but I haven’t been very
impressed with any of his films after 1993’s The War Room. I mostly have
to attribute this to the abandonment of 16mm film thanks to the preeminence of
digital video for documentaries since the turn of the century. I suppose subject matter is also an issue;
it’s hard to live up to a career that included profiles of Bob Dylan, John
Lennon and David Bowie. Somehow things
like Moon Over Broadway (1997) and Down from the Mountain (2000) don’t seem
terribly relevant or ground-breaking compared to direct cinema classics like Don’t
Look Back (1967) and Monterey Pop (1968).
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