The Grocer’s Son
Directed by Eric Guirado
Produced by Milena Poylo & Gilles Sacuto
(A Film Movement/Les Films du Losange release)
Screenplay Eric Guirado & Florence Vignon,
based on an original story by Eric Guirado
Production Design by Valerie Faynot
Cinematography by Laurent Brunet
Editing by Pierre Haberer
Starring: Nicolas Cazale, Clotilde Hesme, Daniel Duval, Jeanne Goupil,
Stephan Guerin Tillie, Liliane Rovere, Paul Crauchet, Chad Chenouga

　　Families, like civilizations, are unique: they are shaped by personalities, values, and resources in ways that are hard to balance, maintain, or predict. Accidents and whims can be as powerful as deep commitments. In Eric Guirado’s film The Grocer’s Son, a young man, handsome, independent, sensitive, sensual, sullen, and alienated from his family, a family he left to explore unspecified ambitions, lives in a city in France, in Lyon, working as a waiter and also infatuated with a neighbor with whom he has a friendly but not intimate relationship. It is the young man’s impulsive response to his restaurant manager’s rudeness, as much as his harsh father’s serious illness, that compels the young man, Antoine (Nicolas Cazale), to leave his job and return to his family, who reside in a small town, in the country. The bickering that goes on between the members of the family—the castigating, ill father, the pleasant but complaining mother, the critical but dependable older brother, and the prodigal son Antoine, the younger brother—is far from anyone’s notion of an ideal and it contrasts even with the joyful old home movies we see of the father and his two sons when they are small boys. Yet, this seems an ordinary family. It is scary to think of how far our intimate lives can be from our hopes and ambitions; and how far our civic life can be from our ideals and even laws. It is interesting, and frightening, to consider how we are able to maintain, and maintain