The lead actors are hot and the living is easy in the French summertime idyll Le fils de l’epicier (The Grocer’s Son). Despite more than a few contemporary fairytale elements and extremely pretty leads and landscapes, the second film from French director Eric Guirado (Quand tu descendras du ciel) is also touching and surprisingly honest, with a genuine eye for character and the small battles of everyday life. As headlined by the excellent Nicolas Cazalé and Clothilde Hesme, this small story of a grocer’s son’s return to his village of birth to take over his father’s shop has all the trappings of a potential crowd-pleaser. The film sold almost 300,000 tickets during its limited summer release in France and could please others elsewhere during any season at festivals and on DVD and TV.

 

Nicolas Cazalé (Le Clan / Three Dancing Slaves) is well cast as Antoine, the 30-year-old bum who left for the big city ten years ago but is forced to go back to the French mountain town of his birth when his father (Daniel Duval) has a heart attack and the family's grocery shop and only livelihood would otherwise need to close. After having quit his umpteenth job as a waiter in the city and upon his brother François’s (Stéphan Guérin-Tillié) insistence he finally give the family a hand, Antoine arrives at home, where his mother (Jeanne Goupil) is the only one who seems remotely happy to have him back in town.

 

Travelling with Antoine is Claire (Clothilde Hesme, Les amants réguliers / Regular Lovers), a bubbly and pretty girl from the city who feels she could use some peace and quiet in the country to prepare for her upcoming exams. Like many of the story’s elements, Guirado and co-screenwriter Florence Vignon take a slightly different route with this boy-girl set-up than the expected bucolic love story (though through some shrewd plotting they get some of that, too).

 

Antoine in fact has feelings for Claire, but she is a free spirit who is glad to help him out on his rounds of the mountain villages with the shop's smaller cousin, a shop on wheels, but she remains non-committal. The fact that they don’t know each other all that well also offers some opportunities for unexpected humour, such as a dinner table conversation during which Antoine discovers that despite her young age, Claire was once married. "Shit happens," is her laconic comment.

 

Guirado hit on the subject of his second film after making a series of documentaries for television about people who hit the road for their jobs. Without making a point of it, Le fils de l’épicier clearly shows that even in the age of the internet and mobile phones isolated villages and especially the older inhabitants still rely on something as simple as a grocer coming by regularly for their daily needs. As Antoine discovers, this does not only mean selling them bread, butter and eggs but also helping them out in all kinds of other ways, which incidentally gives Guirado some more opportunities for some gently comic scenes.

 

Despite some small plot contrivances -- notably one involving an envelope containing Claire’s mock exams and the fact that the state of Antoine’s father’s health conveniently runs parallel to the demands of the plot -- and the somewhat obvious combination of landscapes with rolling hills and pretty guitar music, the overall effect is one of a small and optimistic film that is somehow never unrealistic. Credit the screenplay and the luminous actors for making Le fils de l’épicier a small but nevertheless delicious summer treat.