The Grocer's Son
June. 15,2007Antoine Sforza, a thirty-year-old young man, left his village ten years before in order to start a new life in the big city, but now that his father, a traveling grocer, is in hospital after a stroke, he more or less reluctantly accepts to come back to replace him in his daily rounds.
Similar titles
Reviews
I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much
Best movie ever!
A Disappointing Continuation
It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.
Looking at the reviews for this film they are certainly varied. It's true that the script does not provide information or answers to the questions many viewers, me included, had while watching. Never-the-less I was able to not to hold that against the film and was able to just watch and absorb what was on offer. By the end of the film I had developed a real affection for the characters, the story, and the world they inhabited. It ended up raising questions for me about myself and my place in the world, which like the characters in the film, I am still seeking answers.
I grew up living in the country in the 1970's and have always had a penchant for films about people moving from the big city back to their rural roots, or about the close connections people develop when they rely on each other,because they are all they have to rely on. This film is about that,Like American films Doc Hollywood,or the period drama,Places in the Heart,or gentle romances like Baby Boom and Murphey's Romance,Local Hero and many others. Some set of circumstances brings the main character back to live in a small rural area and they grow to love and appreciate the local people and their close knit ways.This film also features beautiful scenery of the French Alp country,and it makes you wonder if there could be some way that you might be able to live there and make a living,but you expect that you couldn't, or many others would already be there. Still, this film is a pleasant escape from our urban existence for a few minutes.
Le fils de l'épicier/The Grocer's Son (Eric Guirado, 2007) traverses well-worn ground in an appealing way. Nicolas Cazalé is agreeably gruff as the titular character, the Prodigal Son returning to the family he left behind (You Can Count on Me, In My Father's Den), whose pastoral existence is in stark contrast with the hubbub of the metropolis (I Know Where I'm Going!, Local Hero, Doc Hollywood).Arriving with his almost-girlfriend, he takes on his ailing dad's rounds, finding both solace and frustration in the work. It's a bit erratic, with a couple of stretches that just consist of Cazale handing out food and an ending that's slightly rushed, but there are enough offbeat laughs and telling episodes to make it worthwhile. It's also a bit darker than you might expect, or at least more fraught.
Even from his earliest days, Antoine Sfouza has made it the goal of his life not to have anything to do with the family business. That's why, in his late teens, he left the town where he was born and raised and headed off to the big city in search of fame, fortune and a better life for himself. The problem is that now, at the ripe old age of thirty, Antoine finds himself an embittered ne'er-do-well loser, waiting tables in a sidewalk cafe and living in a dreary one-room flat in Paris, all but estranged from the family that raised him. But after his father is hospitalized with a heart attack, Antoine reluctantly returns to help his mother and brother run the grocery store, which, as a part of its service, operates a van that travels around the local countryside, selling goods in towns and villages too remote to have a fully stocked grocery store of their own. It becomes Antoine's job to drive and man the van, even though his gloomy demeanor and prickly personality don't make him exactly a prime candidate for such an assignment.Eric Guirado's "The Grocer's Son" might just as easily have been titled "The Grocer's Prodigal Son," since the movie is a fairly transparent update of that well-known story from the Bible. Yet, lucky for us, the screenplay by Guirado and Florence Vignon fleshes out the allegory with fully realized characters and the kind of family dynamics that can only be hinted at in a brief parable. In a carefully understated performance, Nicolas Cazale plays the brooding, almost completely unsmiling Antoine, who eventually comes to learn that a life spent cut off from the people around him is no life at all. The charming Clotilde Hesme co-stars as the free-spirited and independent 26-year-old college student who rooms and boards with the family and who becomes a major catalyst for change in the young man's life.This is a movie that sneaks up on you slowly and wins you over by degrees - until, in the last half hour or so, it becomes a lyrical, really quite beautiful tale of redemption and compassion, of accepting responsibility and finding one's place in the world. Add to the mix an array of sweet and winning performances by a tremendously gifted cast, a lilting musical score by Christophe Boutin (played mainly on guitar), and generous helpings of lovely French scenery rolling on by, and you have a truly touching and memorable film that will lift your spirits and, for a brief moment at least, make everything seem right with the world.