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.

An entire family chronicle, along with four decades of French social and economic history, is recapitulated as a lavish, hectic dinner, complete with music and belly dancing. It will leave you stunned and sated, having savored an intimate and sumptuous epic of elation and defeat, jealousy and tenderness, life and death, grain and fish.

For me, it's a sign that a filmmaker is on to something if you love hanging out with the characters as they eat and drink and talk and reveal little bits of themselves through everyday action.

Richly enjoyable and consistently surprising.

The movie is a parable of patriarchal pride as well as a paradigm of how immigrant groups can accomplish goals without any help from their host culture.

Escalates into visceral allegory with an abandon and cruelty that seem positively Romanian. The last 30 minutes more than redeem the preceding two hours.

An overlong, dramatically unbalanced picture whose emotional wallop gets somewhat diffused.

the movie starts out rather slowly and is a little confusing with all of the characters their relationships with each other. However, it gradually builds until it becomes very suspenseful and tense in the final 45 minutes, and then with typical French film, ends, leaving the viewer to wonder about how it finally ends. Very absorbing, although some scenes go on too long, and the movie as a whole is rather long, but makes up for it at the end.

The Secret of the Grain is misleading, a very misleading film. And trust me I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing. I said this because this film never seems to explicitly reveal what it's trying to do. This is a humane story, and it would be misleadingly simplistic to say that it's just about family, because there's more to it. Still, there's no big twist or cataclysmic event that causes some kind of melodramatic schism. It's a heartfelt film about something that could be considered nothing, and yet is powerful and emotional. What Abdellatif Kechiche achieves to make you care is his genius design for this film. However the ugly side of his abilities reside in how his ego and his decisive need to make films that come to feel excessive to the point of self-indulgence always tend to taint the actual good things that he does. Nevertheless, watch this film.