The Secret of the Grain (2007)

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So how much do diapers cost? And what will be the cost of diapers for say a 2 year period till a child gets potty trained? And do the diaper manufacturers not ill serve mothers by making them so dry and absorbent that the kids refuse to start appreciating the alternative?And yes they serve as great shock absorbers when kids take a tumble.Calculators are pulled out and the math is done, 7200 Euros for one year, it emerges, a small fortune for struggling immigrants. All this detailed discussion is just one tiny piece from this big film directed by the emerging French auteur Abdellatif Kechiche.The discussion is happening at a Sunday family lunch in the home of a Tunisian immigrant family in a small port city in southern France.Everybody is there, the three daughters, their husbands,children,two brothers and the formidable mother who has prepared her signature dish, fish couscous, except for the father. In a world becoming stubbornly cosmopolitan and westernized the scene of the family eating the couscous noisily, messily and with great relish is heartening. We see the father a little later as his two sons arrive at his squalid hotel room to give him a take away portion.He eats this with a quiet satisfaction. Rym(Hafsia Herzi),who is the young vivacious daughter of the beautiful middle-aged owner of the hotel with whom the father Slimane(Habib Boufares ) is having a relationship, which perhaps divided his family, shares the meal.The film centers around the efforts of an old and out of work Slimane to convert a rusty decrepit boat into a speciality couscous restaurant.In his efforts he will receive extraordinary support from both his families and many friends.At he heart of the moral dialogue in the film is the profound decency of Slimane, his doggedness, his complete understanding of the compromises involved in being a struggling immigrant and his steadfast adherence to his duty.He knows his limitations and makes his life useful to his family at an old age, in ways that they acknowledge, when the easy thing for them would have been to sideline him from their lives.His daughters adore him and rally around him in his hard times.They clearly have theirs hearts in the right place.We see his first wife walking quite a distance to give a plate of the couscous to a homeless man.It reminded me of the custom in many Indian homes to reserve the first chapatti (indian Bread) for a cow and the last one for stray dogs. As a kid I was terrified of this chore of taking the chapattis to the stray animals but looking back I see it as a custom which built in compassion for animals in our daily life.The acting which is uniformly superb by the leads Habib Boufares and Hafsia Herzi, as well as the supporting cast, is a collage of neorealist, formalist and melodramatic elements. Rym played the sensational Hefsia Herzi is the real surprise in the film.Her devotion to her mothers old companion, whom she treats with love and respect, and the lengths to which both her character and Ms Herzi go, bring immense joy to the film.Perhaps its her love which provides Slimane with the strength to pursue his dream of opening a restaurant on a boat.In the extraordinarily detailed final sequence we see a performance of very sensuous belly dancing by the nubile Rym, as she tries desperately to hold the attention of the irritated restaurant guests who are tired of waiting for the main dish of couscous.As she performs the musicians who are mostly old men who stay at her mothers hotel, play for her as they would for a professional. This is also an interesting take on how old men look at young women who are obviously sexually attractive, this scene provides a very civilized and dignified answer.The film has many long and fully fleshed out scenes, all of which are spectacular in themselves but when they are strung together in a film of this length, it begins to wear us down a bit.The film is raw – in content , tone, texture, performances, dialogue,locations and its use of a fluid hand-held digital camera format.Inside its rawness it hides pleasures as wholesome and nutritious as the fish couscous that lends the film its title, but I am afraid this film will end up dividing the audiences into those who completely immerse themselves in its voluptuousness and those who wish for a more economical and smooth treatment of this fertile material.Surely the director is aware of the perils of his strategy of not holding back, of showing us exactly what he wants to, and this makes this a very brave film.The film is set in Sete, a slightly rundown but beautiful port city in southern France, that I used to make business trips to. Watching this film brought back pleasant memories of the Mediterranean sea that provides a constant backdrop to the film.The sea is what both separates and links Europe and Africa, historically the oppressor and the oppressed.Does Mr Kechiche want to convey this group of immigrants as being the representative samples of the North African immigrants? We do not know. But as an intimate case study it will serve as an important artistic marker in Frances struggle to come to terms with its colonial past and the needs of a modern French society, in a post 9/11 world, to banish symbols of conservative Islamic beliefs such as the headscarf.Cinema cannot offer solutions, just mirrors, and this film is a finely embellished one.First published on my blog mostlycinema.com

One that likes generalizations may say that French movies often get trapped in what one may call "a presumptuous way of looking at life". Always that unadjusted narrative, and of course the mysterious/pseudo-philosophical ending. Well, this one is a French contemporary movie that is not attached formulas. The contemplative look is sure french, however the measure is precise. It provides an unbelievable and unexpected intimacy with the characters, which is only recognized by the viewer as the movie comes to the end. Offering a particular time frame that values a constant and naturalistic look at the sequences, this movie conducts you through the beauty of simple things in life as if it was the greatest conquests of human kind.

Abdel Kechiche's heartfelt attempt to render the difficulties and vicissitudes of the Arab minority experience in contemporary France is an admirable and engaging one, at least initially. For the first half of what transpires to be an overlong engagement (at two and a half hours), he's quite adept at delineating the minute emotional and psychological registers of his characters in a style reminiscent of Cassavettes. There's a strong pull in the way the predominance of close-ups and streams of rambling, continuous and naturalistic dialogue propel the viewer into an almost claustrophobic intimacy with the lives of Slimane's immediate and extended family members. One very good payoff inherent in this approach are the numerous suggestions of deeper emotional interests barely withheld even while words are ostensibly offered as honest indicators between people, which does much to contribute a charged and vibrant texture to their various interactions. Unfortunately, this rather heightened naturalism is drastically compromised by Kechiche's shift into unsuccessful melodrama, by way of crudely manipulating plot mechanics to forcibly generate suspense and push the emotional temperature, convincingly delineated up to now through ample character development, in a clichéd and much less satisfying direction for the film's remainder. It's a shame, as it has the effect of belittling so many of the outstanding performances his wonderful cast contributes to make the film memorable, and which not least earn much of our sympathies along the way. The complexities of the relationships which he so carefully orchestrated and which served to move us legitimately, get sadly displaced by contrived events which eclipse this previously far richer focus by substituting a suspense thriller gambit: will things end in total disaster... or can they be saved? This seems like dishonest film-making since throughout the film, Kechiche has readily suggested some of the ways which could possibly work against Slimane's plans to successfully operate his restaurant boat, and some of these are presented quite clearly as tantalizing possibilities. However (and without revealing the ultimate fate of the restaurant's inaugural evening party), what appears as impending failure is entirely due, not to contingencies of personal, social or political elements in conflict with his plans, but sadly an unnecessary creative interference imposed by nothing more than a scriptwriter's decree: an artificially generated happenstance which derails everything. As if this weren't enough, Kechiche additionally forces the pathos needlessly by introducing yet a second incident, which not only further dashes Slimane's hopes, but unfortunately marks the film's entry into an unsubtle realm of allegory, with the action suddenly acquiring a burden of obvious metaphorical meaning, an approach that has been heavily (and heavy-handedly) favored in films by Makhmalbaf, and which make his films relentlessly unsatisfying. And so the film quickly devolves even further into one in which the diminishing returns are painfully drawn out for the remaining hour or so, with fully predictable results. By forcing a symbolic dimension on his character's plight rather than maintaining his earlier naturalism, Kechiche effectively eradicates the conviction previously established in his efforts to raise our consciousness about the human condition, through a fair range of many foibles and attributes of character generously displayed. To be fair, there is some last-moment evidence (on the part of some of the characters) of the lengths which the human spirit willingly contributes whatever efforts possible to salvage an impending disaster, but an ability to come across as genuinely moving has already been undone. Considering the personal cost for Slimane in realizing his project, Kechiche's ill-judged narrative choices aren't just a major disappointment merely because he opted to apply the kind of cheap plot devices all too typical of the dramatic expediency found in Hollywood films. In this light, it appears an act of disregard for his earlier humanism and hard-won truths, so it's an especially ethical disappointment as well.

Last week i went to see the movie La Graine et Le mullet. The movie started with close shots on the faces , which is good as a start in some movies especially the movies that emphasize family values but, it sticked to the faces as in porno movies to the level that you feel that your space perception is already invaded and you feel uncomfortable. Personally I felt like I wanted to go back to the last seat-line in the cinema just to be as far as possible from these annoying shouting characters who, obviously, and despite the good acting, succeeded to make me angry and feel like I wanted to shout back at them loudly, Heck off ! Why ,for god's sake, to repeat the word Couscous thousands of times !!! Why to shoot these endless scenes of uncertainty and emptiness !!! If the film was meant to be a satiric movie and ironically telling stories about foreign families in France ,, I would say the director was genius, because he succeeded to make me angry in a way that i can't remember my self getting angry in a cinema like that. But if he meant to shoot a real life image of these families in France ,, I wish i wouldn't have fell in that nest !! Orientalism-promoting+abuse in the sake of making money !! especially when it comes from an oriental director, in the west !!! I can imagine the success of this film in France and Europe… this is the way they like to see the orient ! and he supplied the best material for that ! endless scenes of shouting, belly dancing which made me not wanting to look at the screen anymore, full of shame !! The kids of the new generation in Frnace against the old one, endlessly teasing the father of the family.The editing was really bad. Long scenes. Interesting story and good actors but the emptiness prevails. Household super clichés and no proper ending after suffering for more than 2 hours ! My rate is 2-3 , the points are for the actors . A bad film .