La graine et le mulet (2007)
The Secret of the Grain (2007
DVDRip | AVI | 624 x 336 | XviD @ cd1 - 1075 Kbps; cd2 - 1175 Kbps | 148 min | 1,45 Gb
Audio: French-Arabic-Russian AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subs: Arabic, Dutch, Greek, English, French,
Portuguese-BR, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish
Genre: Drama
DVDRip | AVI | 624 x 336 | XviD @ cd1 - 1075 Kbps; cd2 - 1175 Kbps | 148 min | 1,45 Gb
Audio: French-Arabic-Russian AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subs: Arabic, Dutch, Greek, English, French,
Portuguese-BR, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish
Genre: Drama
The winner of four César awards, including best picture and director, Abdellatif Kechiche’s The Secret of the Grain is a stirring drama about the daily joys and struggles of a bustling French-Arab family. It has the texture of a documentary but a classic, almost Shakespearean structure: when patriarch Slimane acts on his wish to open a portside restaurant specializing in his ex-wife’s couscous and fish, the extended clan’s passions and problems explode, leading to an engrossing, suspenseful climax. With sensitivity and grit, The Secret of the Grain celebrates the role food plays in family life and gets to the core of contemporary immigrant experience.
I have heard this film being compared to Eat Drink Man Woman, which is fair enough, if not slightly deceptive. Sure, there's a similar veneration for the art of cooking and how this draws and binds families. But the film casts a wider net than this may suggest. For me, it strongly resembles the humanistic and naturalistic stories of Robert Guédiguian, particularly La ville est tranquille (The Town is Quiet).
The actors are largely non-professionals. The use of long takes, including long stretches of dialogue, is very impressive and suggests that some of the script may be improvisational. I liked the chit-chat, the small details of daily life (like toilet-training a child), that films normally gloss over.
The film has a documentary look and feel and parts are like a fly-on-the-wall at a family gathering. For me, the importance of this is to convey how human this family is, with a rich and warm cultural heritage. In particular, it renders as impotent, irrational fears of Muslim culture.
The film works on multiple levels because it taps into the universal everyday concerns that potentially touch us all in one form or another: prejudice against immigrants, attitudes towards Islam post 9-11, globalisation, ageism in the workforce, the effects of poverty, family breakdown and more. Yet, importantly, the film is not preachy but merely presents life in a matter-of-fact way.
The female performances in the film are particularly affecting, especially the young Hafsia Herzi playing Rym, the daughter of Slimane's lover, and Leila D'Issernio who plays his Russian daughter-in-law.
At 148 minutes, the film is quite long, though this is not apparent until the final scene, which seems to be prolonged in real-time for a particular effect. On paper, the story looks like something we've seen before, but avoids all the clichés we might expect. I loved it.IMDB Reviewer
La graine et le mulet (2007)
La graine et le mulet (2007)
