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Dir.: Eric Guirado

Rating: 6.8  |  0 User Reviews  |  Send to Friend

By Lauren Macaluso

When a director -- simply through superior writing and casting -- can persuade you against running away from your past, it’s pretty obvious he has a gift. In this beautifully filmed and scripted story about rediscovering your family, director Eric Guirado focuses on the plaisirs simples of the familiar. When Antoine Sforza (Nicolas Cazale) learns his father (Daniel Duval) has suffered a stroke, he begrudgingly leaves his flat in the city to take over the family business; a quaint alimentation generale, which specializes in deliveries to older locals in the southern French countryside. Behind Antoine's decision to help his mother, Mademe Sforza (Jeanne Goupil), and brother, François (Stephen Guerin-Tillie), at the grocery is the unrequited love he has for his neighbor, Claire (Clotilde Hesme), whom he helps to prepare for college. Antoine’s detachment from his father, due to his leaving home ten years earlier and, in the process, denying their desire to expand the business, is the other conflict of significance the film works towards, but is also the weakest element. The simmering anger between father and son simply dissipates as the film progresses, allowing the relationship between Antoine and Claire to remain central, a plot device that the rest of the film thankfully avoids. Claire, for her part, counteracts the negativity of the father, most memorably in a scene of child-like fun where Claire and Antoine paint the grocery truck to say “Epicerie Volante” (The Flying Grocer). The entire cast, in this way, feeds off one another, and in Guirado's evocatively minimalist style, there is optimal opportunity to shine. Few filmmakers this side of the Atlantic have Guirado's enviable ability to captivate with such simple pleasures as well-rendered characters and hard-earned truths. It's a classic style, one that eschews Hollywood bombast for genuine emotion, and post the Summer Film Apocalypse of 2008, it couldn't have come at a better time.

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