Inside Full Frame: Part Three

Facets' Amy Boyd's series on the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, which ran from April 8-11 in Durham, North Carolina, continues.


The opening night film and the highlight of the Invited Works Program at the 13th Annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is the highly-anticipated North American premiere of D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ new film, Kings of Pastry (2009). The Carolina Theatre, with its 1,000+ seats and two hefty balconies, is packed to the gills with an eager audience that’s jolly and buzzing as if they’ve already had their sugar fix for the evening.

Sadie Tillery, former Full Frame intern and now director of programming whose noble climb speaks to the truly American spirit of the fest, brings the husband and wife filmmakers to the stage, where “Penney” lets us in on the little-known fact that he is to credit for the inception of the fest thirteen years ago after an off-the-cuff comment that he would only contribute to the festival (then known as Double Take) if it was ALL documentary. And so it began!

Kings of Pastry opens with jaunty scenes of French cafes and bakeries. A waitress tosses out a pigeon that’s wandered in off the street for a nice nibble on a fresh baguette while lovers of food dine on tiny, delicate pastries that we might scoff at in the States. Lively Django Rheinhart tunes whisk us along through the streets and alleyways of Lyon where the impossibly prestigious Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (Best Craftsmen in France) competition takes place. Sixteen French pastry chefs compete here every four years in a three-day marathon of piping, sculpting, whipping, drenching and baking to do, as Jacquy Pfeiffer would say, not the “best that you can do, but the best that can be done.”

We meet Jacquy back in the States where he lives and works as co-founder and Academic Dean of the French Pastry School, a premier international institution of pastry arts in downtown Chicago, Illinois. We are invited along with him as he departs for his homeland to compete for the M.O.F. While Kings of Pastry is a charming and buoyant film, it remains true to life with all the tension, twists and surprises that one never really sees coming.

This is a credit to the filmmaking style of Pennebaker and Hegedus, though they would add a healthy dose of luck. Their attention to detail, despite cramped kitchens and quarantined shooting space, is as exacting as the practiced hands of the men they are capturing. This is an event that, contrary to the plethora of Top Chef shows on television, is not staged for the cameras. This is an event that has never before been witnessed by anyone outside of the contestants or judges.

The audience gasps and laughs collectively as if watching the Olympics of pastry, which by all accounts is actually quite a fitting comparison. By the end of the film, we are celebrating, congratulating and consoling our favorite contestant(s) and are left joyful and saddened, encouraged and inspired. Just as the subjects themselves.

The centerpiece, or Center Frame, of the Invited Works Program (new films that have premiered or screened elsewhere), is Robert Patton-Spruill’s film Do It Again (2010) about the legendary English rock band The Kinks. If you’re expecting a rockumentary, you’re in for a surprise. The film is less about the band and more about one man and his love for the band. Or the loss of his youth. Or the nature of family. Or the burdens of the current economic environment. I can’t quite tell.

Geoff Eders is a frustrated Boston Globe reporter with a beautiful wife and daughter, who is obsessed with reuniting the Kinks and the notoriously dysfunctional founders/brothers, Ray and Dave Davies. He has set out on a mission, which he himself calls irrational, to not only reunite the band but also to interview and play impromptu Kinks songs on acoustic guitar with as many pop culture celebrities as will agree to talk to him on camera or over the phone, including Zooey Deschanel, Sting, John Cusack and Yoko Ono. (The filmmakers confided after the screening that Paul McCartney charged them $15,000 for an interview, but then turned around and blocked it from being included in the film.)

Watching Edgers and Sting strum and mumble and harmonize, I find myself just as bored as I was in high school sitting on my boyfriend’s bedroom floor listening to him play sarcastically slow acoustic versions of “God Save the Queen” while ranting about how the Ramones had finally sold out. The producers sprung for some cool archival Kinks footage and stills of the band in their hey-day, which remarkably and deservedly lasted from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, but the film forgoes re-telling their rich rock-n-roll history, instead focusing on Edgers’ mid-life ponderings and boyish (read: annoying) enthusiasm for connecting with others over the band and their songs. With mixed success.

Dave Davies grants the filmmakers a good deal of camera time and, through his interviews, we see past Edgers’ obsession and finally connect and relate to the family struggles and sibling resentment that are still close to the surface for the younger of the two Davies brothers. This is the heart of the film. Maybe the filmmakers missed that, along with the real story: Edgers’ struggle with watching his profession and peers become downsized in the current print journalism downturn, escaping by looking for others to share in an all-consuming nostalgia that can’t be stifled with records or partial-reunion shows.

After being turned-down repeatedly by Kinks lead singer Ray Davies, the film turns into just another “I-couldn’t-get-the-interview-so-I’m-making-the-film-about-trying-to-get-the-interview” film. And the filmmakers sort of revel in that. But what have we learned in the meantime? That Zooey Deschanel can’t pick a favorite Kinks record? That the band actually does play an annual reunion show in London, just without Dave?

By the end of the movie, I am glad to see Edgers come to a greater appreciation for his (growing) family over a warm, fun outdoor dinner. As family and filmmakers alike eat lobster, laugh and sing Weird Al Jankovic’s “Yoda”, I begin to wonder if Ray and Dave Davies will ever get back the innocence of their own youth--before the band, before the feud—and simply enjoy each other’s company over dinner either as family or as people, however fallible.

After a post-screening discussion, I practically leap out of my seat when the first chords of “Picture Book” fill the room, played by a local Kinks cover band, The Kinksmen, and I forgave Edgers, just a bit, for his tiring fixation. Check out The Kinksman below!



Inside Full Frame continues tomorrow with coverage of the Invited Works Program!