Watch The Secret of the Grain For Free

Well Deserved Praise

the audience applauded

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

"The Secret of the Grain" has a very respectable score on IMDb and is on DVD from the fancified Criterion Collection (think art films). However, despite this pedigree, I noticed that the reviews tended to either love the film or strongly dislike it. Put me with the latter group, as the film seemed incredibly dull and amateurish in some ways. The biggest problem is that the film is about two and a half hours long--and could have easily been done in 90 minutes. Too often, scenes go on too long and editing is a serious problem. Too often, also, the camera pans about when folks are talking in a group instead of using edits (which would require multiple cameras). The result is sloppy and heightens the dullness of the film. Overall, the story of a 61 year- old man who wants to open a couscous restaurant may not be the most exciting topic in the world--but the film manages to make it even less interesting at every turn. If you want to see some very well made films featuring Muslim characters who are everyday folk, try watching the films of Majid Majidi. They manage to do everything this film couldn't with similar sorts of characters.

It's the third movie of Abdellatif Kechiche (coming after "La Faute à Voltaire", and "L'Esquive"). All these movies deal in a way or another with the life of Tunisian immigrants in France.This time in "Couscous" the director wanted to show his own background, the universe of his own family, Tunisian immigrants living in Nice, and especially he wanted to bring a tribute to his father, the man who had struggled for all his life to transmit a sense to all of them. It was not to be a biographical film, what Mr. Kechiche was looking for was to catch an atmosphere, and I would say, to catch the ethos.The shootings have not been done in Nice, as the director feared to become much too sentimental. The chosen location was Sète instead, a small Mediterranean town, where the fishermen leave on their boats each morning and sometimes reach North Africa or the Asian borders, a town struggling with the same issues as everywhere in Europe nowadays: decline of production and unemployment, with the small shipyard challenged by concurrence, the fishing industry challenged the same.The director had intended to ask his father to play in the movie and started to look for funding and to organize the team. Meanwhile the father passed away. Mr. Kechiche decided then to put a Tunisian actor in the role of the father. It was Mustapha Adouani, whom the director knew very well. Exactly when shootings were to start, Mr. Adouani fell gravely ill (he died after a few months), so they had to find on the spot another solution.And the solution they found proved brilliant: they hired a non-actor, Habib Boufares, a worker from Nice, a lifelong friend of the father. The role fitted to him as a glove! Actually almost the whole team is of non-actors. The screenplay details were very loosely followed, the director left to the cast the full liberty to improvise. They were playing their own kind of life after all! And they lived their life there, in front of the camera (it was a hand-held camera , to not impede the non-actors in any way). This movie breathes trough all its pores of life, of authenticity, of immediacy! There are only a few professional actors in the cast. Hafsia Herzi (a young actress showing stamina and commitment) plays the step-daughter of the father, a very determined girl, sincerely attached to him and giving full support in difficult moments. There is also Alice Houri, bringing in a secondary role force and sincerity.I have read the reviews to this movie. Many of them are very critical. The movie is excessively long, they say, and there are a lot of scenes that could have been much shorter without loosing anything. It is a 150 minutes film: one third is devoted to a dinner in family; the mother has prepared fish couscous (you could guess), an endless chat is about anything and nothing; a second third is devoted to a dinner on a boat-restaurant, where everybody is waiting for the main course (fish couscous, you betcha).Well, it depends on your taste to like this movie or not (it goes the same with the couscous as a dish). I think the director took this risk, to let each scene to unfold on its own, regardless how long it was taking, for the sake of authenticity. He was interested in catching the universe of that community of Tunisian immigrants, in rendering it as natural as it really is; to get this way the ethos of that world. And he needed for this to not interfere in any way: neither by screenplay, nor by camera, nor by editing.It is a family risking to disintegrate: the parents are separated, one of the sons is cheating his wife, there are tensions with the step-daughter. What keep them strong is the recourse to their specificity when need is: their cuisine, the wonderful plates with fish couscous. And their music and dance, in the most dramatic moments. There is a long scene of belly dance at the end of the movie: I don't want to say more, to not spoil the story. These guys speak only French and follow the French system of values. They keep however their cultural origins as assets.Some reviewers mentioned "Eat Drink Man Woman" of Ang Lee: there also it is cuisine that keeps family against disintegration. I would mention also in this context "A Touch of Spice": a Greek family forced to leave Istanbul will keep their specific identity by keeping to "Politiky Kouzina", the way Greeks from Istanbul use spices in their dishes.For me "Couscous" called in mind also "35 Rhums", another French movie whose heroes also belong to an ethnic minority in France.I think somehow the family in "Couscous" and the movie itself resemble: both could disintegrate, both keep ultimately strong, the family keeping to their cuisine, the movie by keeping to the authenticity of this universe and by getting their ethos.

THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN (LA GRAINE ET LE MULET) as written and directed by Abdellatif Kechiche offers the viewer a different version of the importance of family and the need to bond for survival. Kechiche is known for casting his films with unknown actors (or even fist time actors) and while some may view this as self-indulgent exercise in proving that a film can be made without the aid of a talented cast, others will appreciate the fine performances he is able to draw from both unknowns (Habib Boufares) and stars on the rise (Hafsia Herzi). The story is fairly straightforward (despite the fact that it takes 2 1/2 hours to tell!): in the Southern France port city of Sète, populated with many French-speaking Arab immigrants who eke out a living repairing boats and fishing, lives senior citizen Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares) and his friends and family - an ex-wife chronically angry about missed alimony payments, an adulterer son, and girlfriend who satisfies him and also has a daughter Rym (Hafsia Herzl) who adores him. Slimane struggles with his job, has his hours cut back severely, and together with his friends who also are suffering economically, bond more strongly. Eventually Slimane comes upon the idea of establishing a restaurant housed in a deserted old ship that he purchases and with the help from his family and his friends (especially supported by Rym) he opens his restaurant that features the fish with couscous recipe of his ex-wife. The reason this too-long film ultimately satisfies is the completely spontaneous atmosphere created by director Kechiche: the dialogue feels completely improvised, as though we happen to be passing by Sète and overheard a colony of down and out immigrants from North Africa transform their fates. It may take a lot of patience to sit through the first half of the film, but the end result is rewarding. Grady Harp

Absolutely one of the worst films I've ever seen and one of the worst films ever made. Couscous is an amateur hack job in every conceivable aspect, and I'm quite convinced that I know more about film-making than does Abdel Kechiche, the mooncalf who dreamed up this agonizing-to-watch attempt to create meaning out of a bad script, bad actors, and an utterly idiotic concept. The film's publicity brags that it's the "best French film of the year"; the French film industry should sue Kechiche for even suggesting such a thing. Couscous isn't slow; it's the Chinese water torture, it's root canal without anesthesia, and the film's endless high-volume conversations in which characters talk simultaneously (so you can't understand a flipping thing) are, in themselves, beyond enervating. The protracted sequences of belly-dancing (sordid and embarrassing), of people sitting in a restaurant waiting to be served, and of Habib Boufares running and running and running and running through the streets drag on for a quarter of an hour. There's not one single morsel left to suck out of them—not visual appeal, not symbolic meaning, not plot advancement. Literally nothing. Kechiche sticks his camera on a tripod and goes out for lunch. When he comes back, it's still filming, and you get to watch the entire mess. This guy needs to be banned for life from making films.