Cigalon (Alexandre Arnaudy) manages a restaurant in a small town in Provence. A chef with a high opinion of his past culinary achievements, he makes no effort to attract customers and is rude to those who venture into his establishment expecting to be fed.
To Cigalon, gastronomy is the greatest of all the arts, and so he is naturally aghast when a former laundress named Madame Toffi (Marguerite Chabert) opens a restaurant next door to his. Madame Toffi does not share his elevated notions and intends to serve meals to the general public – an appalling prospect! While Cigalon’s restaurant remains empty, Madame Toffi’s is always busy. To prove he’s the better chef, Cigalon must now start catering to the whims of paying customers or be forced out of business.
Too easily overlooked, the tasty little morsel that is Cigalon is one of Marcel Pagnol’s more accessible films, a succulent comedy that is not so much a farce as a humorous fable, with a particularly cruel sting in the tail. Pagnol was inspired to make the film after encountering a pompous restaurateur in La Treille, in the outskirts of Marseille, who took a sadistic pleasure in being rude to his customers. After the serious drama Angele (1934), Pagnol
was keen to make a comedy which would allow him to try out a new sound recording system. Pagnol’s first attempt to shoot Cigalon was not a success. The sound system proved to be defective and the director had no recourse but to shoot the film again, taking the opportunity to recast most of the roles.
File Name : Cigalon.1935.avi
File Size : 0.97 GB / 991.7 MB
Resolution : 704×528
Duration : 01:12:46
Quality: DVDRip
Language: French
Subs: English, French, German, Spanish (idx/sub files, srt)
Genre: Comedy
