The Grocer's Son (2007)

To me, this movie is perfection.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Absolutely the worst movie.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

This is the first feature film directed by documentary film-maker Eric Guirado. For that reason it records its progress as it goes, rather methodically, like a doctor reading the rise in temperature on a thermometer. This results in the main character, Antoine, played by Nicholas Cazalé, being surly and unsympathetic for more than an hour before he begins to lighten up and become a bit human. Although that is the point of the story, one does tire of his ego-centred rudeness and lack of concern for others to the point where one is barely available for sympathy as he begins, slowly and painfully, to turn into a nicer guy under the softening influence of the quintessentially French countryside and its rustic inhabitants. The film is mostly shot in the foothills of the French Alps, and the scenery is really beautiful. (Guirado himself comes from the area.) Antoine is a renegade son of a bullying father who has fled to Paris long ago to live his own life, not very successfully. He has enough chips on his shoulders to supply a fish 'n' chips shop. He takes offence at everything, and is permanently aggrieved. His father has had a stroke and Antoine is summoned home to the small village from which he came by his mother, to help her run the small family grocery business, which includes a mobile van which takes groceries to people living far from any town, who are mostly elderly and are called 'les vieux' ('the old folks'). He is accompanied by a girl named Claire who has been living with him, but not as a girlfriend. She is played by Clothilde Hesme. Hesme was to appear later with Audrey Tautou, the Elf, in the amusing film HAPPY END (2009), and in the fascinating Raoul Ruiz TV mini-series MYSTERIES OF LISBON (2010), as Elisa de Montfort. She has very blue eyes, and an enigmatic set of expressions which often send mixed signals, thus conveying an unrelenting, continuous ambiguity. That makes her very good casting for a film where the girl's role is not meant to be all that clear. Is she or isn't she? Does she or doesn't she? She's perfect for that sort of thing. Daniel Duval plays the bullying patriarch who constantly criticizes and humiliates his son. With all these tensions going on, things get very, well, tense. At first Antoine is so obsessed with his anger and resentment that he barely sees the beautiful scenery and barely focuses on les vieux, who drive him into a rage when they cannot pay the full price for some petits pois and want a bit of credit 'until next time'. Antoine's father is extremely popular with them all because he has highly personalised and friendly relations with them all going back over the years. Antoine rubs all these people up the wrong way at first and everything is becoming disastrous. Claire helps to humanize him and eventually he is softened into realizing that les vieux are rather pathetic and very nice, that life is peaceful and can be enjoyed, and that the village and the van are not so degrading and exasperating for him after all. The theme of the film is thus how the foothills of the Alps and the eccentric locals who live there can slowly wear away at you like a creek and make you a smoother pebble in the stream of life. So if you stick with it, the film pays off and is well worth watching. But if you demand a thrill a minute, it's not for you. It is slow, steady, and can teach people a lot. Those of us who have lived far from a town know what it is like to expect the appearance of a van which saves us the trouble of driving for many miles for the simplest things, and whether it is 'the fish man', a travelling grocer as in this film, a roving butcher's van, or even a milkman, in 'remote parts' it becomes an event when the van turns up, and people become very jolly very quickly exchanging the latest gossip, and want to know what is happening with so and so down the road. What a pity all of these vans are vanishing, as the supermarkets gobble up all trade and roll out their carpet of mediocrity and dehumanised offerings, and even the women at the checkout are afraid to make a joke lest they lose their jobs for dallying. This film is all about dallying. Long may we dally, until it too is banned as politically incorrect, as so many once harmless jokes now are.

Those who seek to compare and contrast, trace lineage etc will cite as distinguished forbears of The Grocer's Son such titles as Une Hirodelle a fait le printemps, Le Grand chemin etc on the grounds that all three titles feature an urban protagonist either choosing or being obliged to move to a rural setting. Writer-director Eric Guirado throws us a curve inasmuch as HIS protagonist Antoine (Nicilas Cazale) had it up to here with Rural some ten years before the story starts and lit out for Paris where he has been drifting from dead-end job to dead-end job although Antoine would probably argue 'okay, I'm getting nowhere but I'm doing it in Paris, man'. Things change when his autocratic father, Daniel Duval, suffers a heart attack and Antoine very reluctantly agrees to return home and help his mother run the family grocery business, specifically by driving the mobile grocery van to the outlying hamlets that rely on it. His intitial contempt for the customers gradually turns to respect, admiration, affection and yes, even love, end of story. It is, of course, so much more than that and Guirado brings his documentary experience to bear and draws his cast from professional actors - none more distinguished than Paul Crauchet - and ordinary people thus creating a seamless blend of docu-drama replete with sub-plots like the brother who conceals from his family the fact that his wife has left him for some time and is now pregnant by another man, and the love interest, Clotilde Hesme, the divorcée of whom Antoine is enamoured. Purists may argue that Guirado tends to 'sell' the virtues of rural living and ignore the harsher realities explored so brilliantly in the recent documentary La Vie Moderne, and they would be correct so far as it goes but this remains a wonderfully lyrical film that should not be missed.

Talk about your dysfunctional families! The grocer's family gets the five-star award. Antoine is the subject of the film. He left home as a youth and has been pretty much disowned by his father who wanted him to stay in their small village and help him run his grocery. Antoine has not fared well as an adult. He has no work ethic whatsoever and bounces about from one dead end job to the next.It appears his only accomplishment as an adult is to have made a very good friend of a young woman named Claire. She entered a bad marriage early in life, got divorced, and is now working to be accepted to an academy in Spain. Now she has a work ethic as she labors all day and studies late into the night in her quest for higher education.The father is hospitalized, and Antoine begrudgingly visits after an estrangement of almost ten years. Antoine's brother, François is there and appears to have the same animosity for his brother as expressed by the father. François owns a hair salon and appears to be the picture of the successful family man.Antoine wants nothing to do with his family, but his mother begs him to come and run the family business while his father is ill. Antoine strikes a bargain with his mother that includes the opportunity for Claire to quit her job and allow her to devote full time to her studies, so she and Antoine move in above the store with his mother. The first surprise that comes to his mother is that Antoine and Claire do not share a room and that their relationship is platonic. Antoine's mother views this as an interesting insight into her son who, apparently, has always been incredibly self-centered.While the mother tends the store, it is Antoine's job to drive a large van equipped as a mini store to the neighboring villages. Most of the customers are elderly and have had long standing arrangements with the father as to payment, etc. Antoine proceeds to alienate just about everyone on the route with his rudeness and unwillingness to comply with the customs established by his father. Claire saves the day when she starts traveling the route with Antoine as she is friendly and compassionate. He learns from Claire and soon becomes more flexible and affable.Events occur, precipitated by Antoine's selfishness, that cause Claire to return to the city, and Antoine is left there with his mother to carry on as agreed. When Antoine's father returns from the hospital, he is still not able to go back to work. Once the father arrives, we get more insight as to why Antoine is so damaged.This film has superior acting, interesting characters, and beautiful scenery, but it often comes off as somewhat disjointed. I'm not sure if this is due to a weakness in script or editing, but there are, at times, actions that take place that make little sense considering the storyline. None-the-less, it is a good story with charming, insightful characters that creates a positive viewing experience.

Eric Guirado has made documentaries about the French countryside and specifically traveling tradesmen in central and southern France. Directly from that background comes this touching little fiction feature about a family that has a grocery business with a van that travels into the hills and provides daily necessities to aging country people. One of the sons, Francois (Stephan Gillian Tillié of Just a Question of Love) is a hairdresser in town. The other, Antoine (Nicolas Cazalé of Le Clan), left home years ago to live in Paris, but he returns to help out when his father (Daniel Duval) is downed by a heart attack. He stays with his mom (Jeanne Goupil). And very importantly, he brings with him a lively young woman, Claire (Clotilde Hesme, of Regular Lovers). They aren't really involved, but he is bailing her out. She is penniless, the refugee of an early failed marriage. He borrows money from his mom to make this trip, bail Claire out of her debts, and give her a peaceful place to finish her "bac" and apply to college in Spain. His own life in Paris has never jelled. He can't seem to hold a job for three months running.Antoine pretends that he and Claire are married. And Francois, who lives elsewhere but comes by for meals, is pretending all is fine with his wife, who has left him some time ago. This isn't a family that communicates well, and Antoine left them because things weren't right; but neither was his own behavior as a youth--as we find out from Lucienne (Liliane Riviere), a feisty old lady on the van's grocery route who does not remember him with favor. Antoine also becomes more involved with Old Man Clement (Paul Clauchet), whose hen's eggs are practically all he has to offer any more. Guirado is remarkably skillful at making the constant trips in the grocery van different and reflective of changes in Antoine. Grounded in documentary technique, the film has a wealth of specific detail and never seems forced. And on top of that those in the main roles are actors with presence, anchored in center stage by the hunky, soulful Cazale and the vibrant, very French Clotilde Hesme. There is star quality here yet Cazalé, Tillié, and Duval, though you might not have known to pick them from a crowd, look very much like blood relations. That's good casting.This is a very slight story, with some elements of too-sweet resolution, and it hardly seems likely to have much of a future as a US release. What makes it work are two things: the wealth of authentic country people who make up the secondary characters, the "customers" Antoine takes groceries to; and the fact that there are emotions here, that you care about Antoine and Francois and their dangling lives, the disgruntlement of their dad, Antoine's discovered affection for Claire, and his gradual acceptance, for the lack of anything better but because he has a basically good heart, of the idea that he might find a life in the rural world he fled from.The Grocer's Son/Le fils de l'épicier is part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, February 29-March 9, 2008. No US distributor at that time. Later limited US theatrical release starting in June 2008.