The Grocer's Son

Directed by Eric Guirado. With Nicolas Cazale, Clotilde Hesme, Daniel Duval and Jeanne Goupil. Distributed by Film Movement. In French with subtitles. 1 hour, 36 mins. No MPAA rating (sex, nudity, profanity, adult themes). Playing at: Ritz Five.

It's not the Provence of Peter Mayle, not the one the tourists flock to, and at first, in The Grocer's Son, it's not a place where the gruff, scruffy protagonist - a 30-year-old city slacker named Antoine - wants to be.

But as Eric Guirado's small, seductive movie rolls along, Antoine (Nicolas Cazale) - reluctantly returned to his childhood home to help his ailing dad with the family business - rediscovers the simple pleasures of life. And he reconnects with his family, and with the stooped old farmers, retirees and widows who depend on the family's traveling grocery truck for their foodstuffs and supplies.

If The Grocer's Son takes a predictable course - disaffection and disconnection turned around over the course of a summer in the hill country of southern France - the filmmaker and his cast bring an easygoing naturalism to the affair. There's no pretense here, no bombast, and a lot of charm.

Cazale's Antoine, brooding and adrift in Paris, invites his flat mate, Claire (Clotilde Hesme), to accompany him while he takes over his father's route in the rickety white delivery truck. She does. The relationship has been platonic, although Antoine wants it otherwise. Claire's planning to go off to university in Spain - her optimism and good cheer a stark counterpoint to Antoine's grumbling selfishness.

Shot on the winding backroads and tiny villages of one of the most idyllic landscapes on earth, The Grocer's Son offers a nicely observed portrait of a man in search of himself, finding his purpose, and finding that, in fact, it is possible to go home again.

- Steven Rea