Kings of Pastry is a fun documentary by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus about the preparation and competition to become a Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (or MOF) in pastry. It is basically the highest honor a pastry chef can achieve and the competition is one of the hardest imaginable. It's a lot like the Food Network Challenge show - with gigantic wedding cakes and insane sugar constructions - but much bigger and more important. The final competition takes place over the course of three days and as it occurs only every four years, the chefs prepare for months and months for it.
The main person we follow is Jacquy Pfeiffer who runs the French Pastry School in Chicago, but is originally from Alsace. He is a very warm and charismatic guy who has spent his life working with pastry and is surrounded by MOF winners in his work (two of his colleagues have the blue, white and red collar already). We see him producing some of the most magnificent sugar and chocolate treats in his test kitchen while testing out the taste, timing and execution of his desserts. He then moves his operation to his home region in France where he works in the kitchen of an old friend just a few weeks before the competition.
We also meet young pastry chefs Philipp Rigollot and Regis Lazard two of Pfeiffer's competitors (although, I guess they're not really competitors as there is no limit to how many winners there are and each man is able to win... they're really just other chefs trying to win the title).
We see all the crazy things they have to do to win and all the stress they are under to be perfect on the three days of the challenge. We see one chef's hopes of success all but crash on the ground when his sugar sculpture creation (which stood almost five feet tall) shatters and falls apart. He begins to cry as it will not be for another four years that he could try again.
There are a bunch of rather lazy and silly things that the directors do here that I don't like. One thing is that the film opens in Paris with a pretty banal shot of the Eiffel Tower as seen from the top of the Grande Roue in the Tuileries. Not only does the shot look like it was taken on a tourist's Flip camera and is so deeply trite, but the film has almost nothing to do with Paris - the competition takes place outside of Lyon (there is some dinner that Sarkozy throws for the winners that we see at the beginning, but that's it). Are we that dumb that we can't understand "France" without seeing the "Eiffel Tower"? It's pretty annoying.
This is a sweet (no pun intended), but not brilliant movie. At most, it should be seen on DVD and not in the theater.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
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