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Reviews Counted:42
Fresh:38
Rotten:4
Average Rating:7.7/10
Consensus: A complex portrait of an immigrant family, The Secret of the Grain is a sprawling, intimate film with many fine performances.
Rated: Not Rated
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release:2007
The Secret Of The Grain is more complicated than it sounds, less geared toward uplift than in revealing the fault-lines within this sprawling, multi-generational family and between their immigrant culture and their French hosts.
Writer-director Abdel Kechiche has wrought a definitive statement on how it feels to live in a subculture.
The Secret of the Grain takes one man, his children, their spouses and babies, his ex-wife, his girlfriend, her daughter, and his friends and turns it all into a masterpiece about the strange power of food -- to heal, unite, exasperate.
Top CriticA dark and hilarious parable of human absurdity.
The Secret of the Grain is crowd-pleasing in the sense that the story and characters are easy to identify with...belongs somewhere between the arthouse and the multiplex.
Kechiche projects onto the viewer an immigrant population's impatient longing for liberty, equality and success, concocting a dish that is no more bitter or half-baked than cultural exile itself.
The Secret of the Grain never slows, always engages, may continue too long, but ends too soon. It is made of life itself.
Top CriticThe wonderful thing about Hafsia Herzi in The Secret of the Grain...is the way she and the character tiptoe around the story's edges for a while, taking their time and easing onto the audience's radar.
Top CriticSome unusually strong ensemble performances deliver a microcosm of Tunisians living outside their native land in France.
Never sagging, it unfolds over 2 1/2 hours. Nothing is overexplained. Indeed, it takes us time to suss out Slimane's various familial relationships.
Despite some strong performances from the mostly amateur cast, as well as some intriguing insights into family dysfunctions and racial prejudice, the movie still comes across as being self-indulgent and at least a little disappointing.
This is both fascinating domestic melodrama and damning indictment of the intolerance that can exist across all sections of society.
I wish The Secret of the Grain had another title, something that conveys the vibrancy teeming in this great drama of daily life -- something less grainy.
Top CriticThough not all of the film's 151 minutes feel indispensable, the story and mise-en-scene of this immigrant family's daily struggles are so involving that it is still well worth seeing on the big screen.
Aside from a slight flabbiness ... Kechiche is to be praised for exploring the nature of change on a personal and a community level -- and packing the result with some emotional wallop.
A year of uncommonly strong French releases hits its peak with Abdellatif Kechiche's richly entertaining and complex humanistic saga about an extended French-Arab family in the south of France.
Before you scoff at yet another benevolent look at a family straddling two cultures, Kechiche subtly subverts the genre.
Time stretches out to the limits of endurance, Slimane's and ours, and there are moments toward the conclusion of this picture when you will want to scream and throw things at the screen, but it's mesmerizing. When it does end, suddenly, it feels a little
Through his superlative cast of performers, Kechiche's family portrait is a doting record of the innate resiliency of this beloved community.
Give some patience to The Secret of the Grain and the rewards are there for the reaping.
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