Le Fils de l’épicier (2007) - film review

When Antoine Sforza offers to lend some money to his best friend Claire he could not have imagined where this would lead.  The fact is that Antoine is broke, a thirty-year-old drifter who just about manages to make ends meet by doing odd jobs in Lyons.  The only way he can raise the money which Claire needs to complete her studies is to borrow from his mother.  To pay his mother back, Antoine must swallow his pride and return to his home town, deep in rural France.  With his father in hospital recovering from a heart attack, Antoine agrees to help out in the family grocery business.  With no one to advise him, he soon manages to alienate all of his customers, most of whom are elderly and mistrustful of the unfriendly young urbanite.  Luckily, Claire is there to help him out.  She takes time off from revising for her exams to teach Antoine the rudiments of salesmanship.  When Claire begins to take an interest in his brother François, Antoine becomes moody and he ends up driving her back to Lyons.  Not only does his brother give him a hard time, Antoine is also berated by his father, who still hasn’t forgiven him for running away many years ago.  Antoine soon regrets his decision to return to his home town, but then events conspire to make him see things from a fresh perspective...

Some films stay with you long after you have watched them, and it is not always the most showy, hyped or groundbreaking films that have this effect.  Some films linger, echoing in the crevices of your mind, not because they have big budgets, big stars and stunning visual effects, but because they are genuine, subtly innovative and offer some essential truth that we can readily relate to.  Le Fils de l’épicier is surely one such film, a modest, understated and yet utterly beguiling piece in which a young man is compelled to reconcile himself with his estranged family and, in doing so, comes to realise what his life means.

Remarkably, Le Fils de l’épicier is the first fictional feature from Eric Guirado, previously known only as a documentary filmmaker.  Guirado’s background in documentaries shows throughout this film – both in the realism with which his characters are portrayed and the way in which he uses the camera to capture the raw natural beauty of the world they inhabit.  Nimbly sidestepping the familiar clichés of rural folk, the film gives us an authentic insight into French country life that is both poignant and humorous.  Colourful characters, such as the cantankerous man-hating Lucienne and a doddery farmer who pays for tins of peas with eggs, provide some amusing excursions from the main drama, which alternates between bittersweet comedy and sombre contemplation as the central character, Antoine, makes the transition from surly late-adolescence to responsible adulthood.

The film’s loose structure works because it is held together by a strong central performance from Nicolas Cazalé, who was nominated for a César in the Most Promising Actor category in 2008 for his work on this film.  It is not easy to play a morose, unsociable lead character in a way that keeps the audience’s sympathy, but Cazalé manages to do just this, so much so that when his character offers the faintest glimmer of a smile, it feels like the sun has just managed to bulldoze its way through a barrage of concrete storm clouds.  Cazalé may not have won the César but he was one of the big revelations in French cinema in 2007 and, on the strength of his performance in this film, you cannot doubt that he has a great career ahead of him.  Needless to say, the same applies to director Eric Guirado, if this delightful first offering is anything to go by.

© James Travers 2010

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