At the Movies: The Grocer’s Son
Talk about spot on.
Right after Knuckle and Raewyn Hill start a local delivery service, the Village Theatre has chosen to screen The Grocer’s Son. If you’re one of their customers, it’s a very relevant movie, and you’ll appreciate their good service all the more. In fact, it’s relevant to any country community like ours.
You see, Antoine, the city son of a hospitalised village grocer, is a sullen, unmotivated loser, and when he reluctantly agrees to return to his childhood home and save the family business by driving the local delivery rounds, he’s a customer relations nightmare on wheels.
He’s rude, but he’s not really bad. He’s also an OK (if self-absorbed) friend to the sunny, motivated Claire, who he rather fancies and takes to the country with him, promising she can continue her studies toward her admission to a Spanish college.
Now when I say village grocer, I don’t mean the equivalent of Fresh Choice, nor the Collingwood Store. I’m talking Langford’s Store-type timewarp deep in the stunning, drowsy beauty of the Rhône-Alps in eastern France. There, ingrained tradition insists you keep the family business going, even if that family is fermenting with repressed grievances and your closest relatives regard you with contempt.
Despite his mother’s support and Claire’s mischievous and effective sales input, by half-way through the movie there’s no easy victory in sight. Antoine systematically alienates his only supporters, and I was ready to bet my last baguette that he was a completely lost cause.
But director and co-writer Éric Guirado had other plans. An experienced documentary-maker, he eschewed the story’s obvious comic potential and let it play out as a light-hearted, humanistic drama with audience-satisfying realism. The French make great comedies, but this intimacy may be more sustaining.
The film appeals to a wide audience because its issues are universal, and it was a box-office hit in France. You know immediately you’re in very competent hands because of the incredible amount of work done in the first minute. For 18 months, Guirardo filmed travelling tradesmen in France, Corsica, the Pyrenees and the Alps. In The Grocer’s Son he creates an array of aging, challenging, self-reliant and likeable customers, and the best moments lie in the conflicts between urban youth and rural wisdom, where the battleline is drawn across the counter of the van, retorts and silences become weapons, and the spoils of war are mutual respect and some well-learned lessons in life.
This part of France is lavender country, with vineyards, olive groves and heat-hazed valleys, medieval villages, mountains and national parks. I passed through it in 1991 during a languorous summer, and the cinematography captures the sensuosity of the landscape. But there’s no lingering sentimentality in the setting or the acting, which is subtle and credible all round. There’s skill behind Nicolas Cazalé’s portrayal of the irritating, immature, skill-less wonder Antoine; Clothilde Hesme is luminous as Claire, and Liliane Rovère’s prickly, feisty Lucienne is a treasure.
I caught myself wondering whether the contrasts between city and country were always as great, or whether they’re increasing. Welcome to the Sticks, another film about the virtues of rural life, recently became the most popular comedy ever released in France. It may be that as world recession bites and the Western world’s “useless generation” is pressed to swap consumer excesses for a sewing machine or a garden, that compost-brown may become the new black, and that audience interest may drift away from bleak urban offerings.
I live in hope.
Maria Polglase
The Grocer’s Son (Le Fils de L’Epicier) (M): The next screenings at the Village Theatre are on Sunday 28 June at 4:30pm and Thursday 2 July at 7:30pm (FINAL).
