Product Details

• Actors: Habib Boufares
• Directors: Abdellatif Kechiche
• Format: Dubbed, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Language: French
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.77:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: IMAGE ENTERTAINMENT
• DVD Release Date: July 27, 2010
• Run Time: 154 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B003ICZW8W
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #60,875 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "The Secret of the Grain (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

The south of France seen in director-writer Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain is a far cry from the rolling countryside, quaint little towns, and romantic seaside resorts pictured in tourist guidebooks. The port city of Sète, where the story happens, is a gritty, charmless place, home to a community of French-speaking Arab immigrants for whom life is a quotidian challenge merely to get by. Among them is 61-year-old Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares), whose problems are legion: his hours as a dockworker have been cut back, his ex-wife nags him about dilatory support payments, his thoroughly unreliable elder son is a serial adulterer who barely acknowledges his wife and young child. But it's not all bad; this taciturn, stoic man also has other children who love him, a girlfriend who tries to comfort him, and, in his lover's daughter Rym (newcomer Hafsia Herzi, whose performance is the best in the movie), a smart, feisty young advocate who's genuinely devoted to him. Slimane also has a plan: having bought a rusted-out wreck of a ship, he wants to convert it into a restaurant staffed by his family and starring his ex's delicious fish couscous (hence the French title: La graine et le mulet--as in the fish, not the haircut). How all of this unfolds, including Rym helping Slimane negotiate the tedious bureaucratic roadblocks standing between him and his dream, is absorbing, if not exactly riveting. Kechiche seems more interested in creating texture than telling a story; this is a long (two and a half hours) film with a great deal more talk than action, dominated by various extended family scenes featuring handheld camera work and lingering close-ups. But viewers who hang in there will be well rewarded, as the tale builds to a bittersweet climax highlighted by Rym's belly dance, an extraordinary sequence that is much better seen than described (a 45-minute re-edit of this scene is the highlight of the excellent bonus material, which also features an interview with the director and several featurettes). --Sam Graham

Product Description

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 port-side restaurant specializing in his ex-wife’s fish couscous, the extended clan’s passions and problems explode in riveting drama, 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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ABDEL KECHICHE, OPUS 3, December 4, 2008

By 

Daniel S. "Daniel" (Geneva, Switzerland) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Secret of the Grain ( Couscous ) ( La Graine et le mulet ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.4 Import - Australia ] (DVD)

***** 2007. Written and directed by Abdel Kechiche. Four French Academy awards (Best movie, director, writing and promising actress), Prix Louis Delluc and five awards in Venice. The difficult integration of the Arab born community in the social life of the Port of Sète, France. After Games of Love and Chance, a movie that was also chosen as best French film in 2003, Abdel Kechiche returns with this allegorical vision of integration. The French title, LA GRAINE ET LE MULET aka The Seed and the Mullet refers to the culinary specialty, a couscous with fish, the hero of THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN wants to propose in his restaurant. If you consider that, on top of this important theme, magnificently handled, the performance of the actors is human and natural, you'll understand why this film has to be considered as the best French film of last year. A masterpiece that should already be in your library.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Les Miserables Maghrebi, December 27, 2008

By 

Diana F. Von Behren "reneofc" (Kenner, LA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Secret of the Grain ( Couscous ) ( La Graine et le mulet ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.4 Import - Australia ] (DVD)

Is there a secret to the grain?

Not really, its like good lasagna to a second/third/fourth generation Southern Italian American family gathered around a dinner table somewhere in a bedroom community of New York City. The wonderful earthy kitchen aromas of tomato sauce, perfectly spiced meatballs and Parmigiana Reggiano lend a sensual ambiance that lulls these assimilated would-have-been peasants from the Old World into a cultural time capsule that transcends all the homogenization (education/refinement/development) that the New World has to offer.

Director Abdel Kechiche understands this need for Old World familiar. In his film "La Graine et le Mulet" (The Grain and the Mullet) his characters savor the Tunisian dish of couscous and fish as the one universal crowd pleaser that sensually nourishes and positively unites all the film's characters (North African immigrants and the ensuing Beur generation of French-born, Verlan-speaking, traditionally Arabic albeit French citizens) otherwise burdened in varying degrees dependent on age and generation by simple survival in an adopted country (France) where assimilation flounders on culturally diverse ground.

Kechiche exquisitely renders the lives of 61 year-old Slimane (Habib Boufares and his large family with a deft pointillist's love of detail that seems so natural as to be unscripted and unedited. Mundane slices of everyday life are studied almost to the audience's saturation point--Kechiche's camera shifts with a tremulous vibrato as it picks up facial details and seemingly meaningless gesticulations during family conversations revolving around potty training and marital life. Astonishingly, these segments immerse the audience with their living and breathing authenticity--one cannot help being a part of all those dinners as the tongue-tied guest assimilating into a world of family that becomes easier to know as the platters progressively move around the table. After two and a half hours of watching and listening the actual storyline does not seem to matter as much as becoming an honorary member of the family and steadfastly interloping on vignettes that reveal not only character but also a wider universal theme of when what was once called multiculturalism ironically morphs unbeknownst to its observers as `the' culture of the country.

The plot vehicle that allows us our voyeuristic adventure is the plight of Slimane. After working for over thirty-five years in the shipyards, a taciturnly distraught Slimane finds his hours cut and his construction of a better life in France fraught with the holes of regret and invalidated by suggestions from his sons to return to a mother country that in the hopeful temptation of dream could offer him untold riches. Divorced from the mother of his children, Souad (Bouraouïa Marzouk), he lives in a small room that is part of the hotel owned by his girlfriend, Latifa (Hatika Karaoui), and her 20-something daughter, Rym (Hafsia Herzi) with whom he has a close relationship that exceeds that which he has with his own children. To alleviate his financial woes, he decides rather cavalierly to renovate an old boat and convert it into a restaurant where he will serve Souad's marvelous couscous and fish to the music of a hypothetical cash register ringing.

Amidst the interferences of family life in which the audience discovers the interplay between Souad's daughters and Latifa and Rym, the film plays out its final act on opening night aboard the new floating restaurant with all the passion of a Greek tragedy. Complete with a chase scene that leaves one white knuckled with both frustration and exasperation (the scene seems to go on and on), we are treated to food, drink, belly dancing and a fly in the ointment that eventually ends with a gasp and double take as the credits roll.

Bottom line: "The Secret of the Grain" is fascinating. Highly recommended it engulfs one in its reverence for family minutia where we sympathize with the plight of Slimane but also remember the dreams of other immigrants in other places as they assimilate into countries that are both benevolent and haughty in their expectations. Actress Hafsia Herzi hums with an intensity that acts as the perfect loquacious foil for the quiet lead, Slimane.
Diana Faillace Von Behren
"reneofc"

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Bicycle Thief, Marseilles edition., May 19, 2009

By 

Amateur curmudgeon "kaleun76" (Lakewood, CO United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Secret of the Grain (La Graine et le Mulet) (Subtitled in English) (Region 1 DVD, USA/Canada Edition) (DVD)

The French have a habit of making movies that start off very slow, and then capture your attention, not with action, but with emotion and story. This is the case with this story about a shipyard worker that is getting laid off. The tensions that emerge, with his nagging ex-wife, his children and their families, with whom he keeps as close as he can, and his girlfriend and her daughter who thinks of him as a father, combine with his efforts to open a restaurant on a boat that he bought.
What could have been a testament to tenacity, the power of love, friendship, community and family however becomes a moral tale where the morale is: "Why bother?"
The belly dance scene by the girlfriend's daughter Rym (Hafsia Herzi) trying to save the restaurant is outstanding. At the end, just as everyone, friends and enemies, are pitching in to save the day, the director decides to finish the story, not as an elegy, or an inspiring tale, but as a mockery to the power of human effort.
It reminded me of "The Bicycle Thief" Only in color.