Courtesy First Run Features
Seemingly miles away from the subjects of D.A. Pennebaker’s signature documentaries, Don’t Look Back and The War Room, Kings of Pastry follow several men as they prepare for and compete in the prestigious MOK, Meilleurs Ouvilliers de France (Best Craftsman of France)—a tri-annual competition to crown the best craftsmen of France. While the competition’s categories extend well beyond food, Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus take the pastry competition as their focus; their cameras go where none have before, and this behind-the-scenes documentary is as riveting as any of Pennebaker’s. Competitors are judged not only by their final products, but on many levels, including technical skills, respect for tradition, refinement, and amount of waste produced (even the garbage is inspected by judges).
Like many of the best documentaries, Kings of Pastry carves a narrative out of “real life” but resists standard story arcs featuring heroes and villains and customary climaxes and resolutions found in more mainstream documentaries. The film focuses primarily on French pastry chef Jacquy Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer is a likable, almost American everyman, with girlfriend and merged family, house in the suburbs, and morning commute. Pfeiffer puts all this on hold for the competition. After years of preparation, Pfeiffer departs for France six weeks before the event, leaving family and the Chicago pastry school he founded to focus exclusively and intently on preparation for the three-day marathon competition.
The film rounds out Pfeiffer’s portrait with those of Phillippe Rigollot and Regis Lazard, French–based chefs. Rigollot has dreamed of the competition since he heard about it, and Lazard is a second-timer, still haunted by dropping his sugar sculpture three years previous. Like Pfeiffer, both risk family and financial stability to chase this exclusive title.
Pennebaker takes his time building our relationships with the primary characters, studying their preparations, histories, and investments. After watching their remarkably calm preparations, the action heats up when the three-day competition begins. Men, who matter-of-factly tossed failed cakes and second-rate macaroons, are brought to tears, sobs almost, by the intensity of the labor and scrutiny of the judges.
Competition is not quite the right word, as all or none sixteen finalists could earn the title, and they are almost sportsman-like in their comradery and commiseration over things such as the kitchen’s humidity and sugar’s consistency. When one of the creations inevitably shatters, all seem stricken, judges included, honestly sharing pain in the failed creation.
Throughout, the incredible precision of the craft dominates (despite the jaunty musical accompaniment), where cream puffs will be judged by their symmetry and obscenely ornate sugar sculptures by the smoothness of their seams. Similarly, while the chefs seem infuse the process with passion and pride, there is little of the infatuation that fuels pastry lovers—no evidence decadent indulgence in the tasting, no joy in the miraculous creation of these sweets. This is work—hard, serious work. Even the awards ceremony is marked more by tears than by joy and winners and losers accept their fates with at least superficial stoicism.
Real life doesn’t give the ending that we want to see scripted, and Pennebaker can’t resist appending a happy ending, one that feels a bit tacked on, but serves as a postscript, or even an antidote to all that obsessive preparation and intensive performance, life back in balance and the knowledge that there’s always another chance.
