French Movie

[lsanderson]

Fresh Produce for Ratatouille, Please, but No Attitude
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: June 6, 2008

The rolling countryside of Provence may be a dream vacation spot, but it is the last place in the world that Antoine (Nicolas Cazalé), the sullen 30-year-old protagonist of “The Grocer’s Son,” would like to be. In this French variation of the fable of the prodigal son, Antoine reluctantly returns to his rural hometown after 10 years in the big city when his father (Daniel Duval) has a heart attack.

Someone has to run the family’s grocery store while his father recovers, and Antoine’s unhappily married older brother, François (Stéphan Guérin-Tillié), who stayed by their parents when Antoine fled, insists the time has come for Antoine to shoulder some responsibility. While their mother (Jeanne Goupil) has minded the store, their father has operated a van selling produce and staples to the area’s mostly elderly inhabitants.

This small gem of a film, a surprise hit in France, is the second feature directed by Éric Guirado, who prepared for it by filming portraits of traveling tradesmen in southern and central France. For 18 months he focused on mobile grocers in Corsica, the Pyrenees and the Alps. As the movie affectionately observes the gruff, self-reliant customers, some of whom hobble to the van on canes, it has a documentarylike realism. You grow to respect these hardy, weather-beaten people who lived their whole lives close to the land.

Antoine brings to his customers the same surly, put-upon attitude with which he confronted his superiors in urban restaurants where he held and lost a succession of waiter’s jobs. Brusque and detached, he repeatedly offends old folks whom his father had befriended on his rounds. Even when they voice their disgruntlement, Antoine doesn’t seem to notice. More