Perry Kate Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Pierre Radulescu 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.

Rizar Realism can sometimes deepen a film by drawing from the ordinary events in our experience that surprise us, make us think, change our perspective, or otherwise entertain us. "The Secret of the Grain" is one of those films that tries to use simple daily happenings as raw material to let us observe a time slice of another culture. It takes awhile for the film to strike a chord due to some early self indulgent pacing. But when it focuses on Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares), a 61 year old Maghreb (North African) immigrant and 35 year ship worker (at a French port city), it curiously becomes inspiring and gripping.Slimane is a crafty handy man with a no nonsense kind of stoicism. He's the sort of person who stares at his boss or relatives blankly as they go through emotional extremes. And they often go ballistic. He saves one of his granddaughters from her angry mother, who was scolding her daughter for not using the toilet (and going through all their expensive diapers). His boss looks quite unhinged and demands Slimane to stick to a set work schedule. Slimane's ex-wife wants her unpaid alimony instead of the free fish he keeps bringing. And so on with other members of his large extended family. Abdel Kechiche's film avoids preaching to the viewers, but each of these encounters has its own lesson, such as deceitful consumerism, French prejudice, fractured relationships, family loyalty, traditional values, friendship, and bureaucratic red tape.The little details draw us in and force us to marvel at Slimane's almost romantic initiative. Instead of accepting reduced hours on his already tight income, Slimane quits his job to open a couscous restaurant on a ship he owns. First he has to restore the decrepit ship, mostly on his own with a bit of help from his son, Riadh (Mohamed Benabdeslem). He works nonstop on cigarettes and coffee. He has no experience running a business, but he takes a leap of faith, drawing on his immense creative experience as a shipbuilder. It translates well to designing a classy restaurant, especially absent a narrow minded boss setting time schedules and trying to limit workers to minimal hours/wages.It's a family affair from the beginning. Rym (Hafsia Herzi), the daughter of Slimane's new girlfriend, helps navigate him through the process to get a bank loan and apply for licenses. Hafsia Herzi is a French actress on the rise, but it looks like she's keeping to French films for now. Her character, Rym, is better at communication than him, and she provides energetic encouragement along the way. She becomes crucial to the opening of the restaurant when problems arise, with a completely unexpected belly dance in seductive red (predictably you can find her dance on You Tube). Good thing the customers were well on their way to drunkenness, or else they might have thought such a dance was inappropriate at a professional restaurant.As you see, the film has its share of fun twists that hold your curiosity to see whether the family can make the restaurant successful. Some of the daughters and servers think evil spirits keep getting in the way to punish them for their faults (such as Slimane's ex-wife supporting him as the head cook, angering his current girlfriend and hotel owner). If any of these events have a sense of comic weirdness, it just shows that real life is a constant source for strange happenings that sometimes seem more original than the imaginings of a writer.However, sometimes the camera is quite boring as a guide through the first half of the movie. Not every daily ritual critically captures the substance of a culture. The film's slow pacing through dinner conversations and diaper price complaints isn't realistic in the least. Life is slower, more diverse, more subjective (you get to choose to ignore or tune out certain people, talk to others, and look around at your whim), and less queasy (the camera slightly shakes like a hand held). The eye of the camera zooms in close to empathize with its choice of faces like a single player video game. One scene in particular of a family gathered around a dinner table talking and eating was something close to visual torture.Its mimicry of realism pays off in the second half of the film, however. It has an inspiring story of an older immigrant (Slimane) taking a chance for the sake of his kids. He wants to pass along his business with an admirable desire to improve their collective situations. He takes in their outrage and outbursts, but instead of raging against the world like them, he acts with his craftsman hands to change the fundamental tension of their near poverty. Is the lesson that immigrants make some of the best entrepreneurs as they transform their suffering (a common source for creative and productive energy) into opportunities to overcome obstacles? It's not a preachy film meant for such arguments, but it allows plenty of room for further discussion. It has important lessons about cultural tolerance, family cohesion through adversity, and the plight of average workers.The film's title, "The Secret of the Grain", is awful to say the least. It makes you think of farmers, not couscous and mullet, the main specialty of Slimane's ex-wife (and thus his restaurant). The German title is more explicit and literal: "Couscous with Fish" (Couscous mit Fisch). The UK and Spanish title cut off the fish part with "Couscous". In any case, it's a family drama set at a fishing port, far from the rural country, and it's well worth checking out.

muaddib-20 I am afraid this is a movie talking to a very specific audience: Arab immigrants in France. Much as Woody Allen movies may only be fully understood by New York Jews, also because of cultural references unintelligible to anybody else, even New Yorkers, so this movie contains few universal values, as it tells a sad story in a not particularly talented way. Camera usage is "modern", though not so much to make you feel seasick, characters are fairly cardboard ones, with very few being anything more. And I must admit I dislike the ending, for reasons that will be obvious once you watch it. An unnecessary long, sad, tired story of unhappy people in an unhappy country (which France is not, to French and most Western Europeans, by the way). Some commentator here compared it to neorealism. Linking this to neorealist movies is unwarranted: there is very little depth here. All is very superficial, skin deep, and does not last long. A movie which is unlikely to make you think, unfortunately.

yamenj-1 Last week i went to see the movie La Graine et Le mullet. The movie started with close shots on the faces , which is good as a start in some movies especially the movies that emphasize family values but, it sticked to the faces as in porno movies to the level that you feel that your space perception is already invaded and you feel uncomfortable. Personally I felt like I wanted to go back to the last seat-line in the cinema just to be as far as possible from these annoying shouting characters who, obviously, and despite the good acting, succeeded to make me angry and feel like I wanted to shout back at them loudly, Heck off ! Why ,for god's sake, to repeat the word Couscous thousands of times !!! Why to shoot these endless scenes of uncertainty and emptiness !!! If the film was meant to be a satiric movie and ironically telling stories about foreign families in France ,, I would say the director was genius, because he succeeded to make me angry in a way that i can't remember my self getting angry in a cinema like that. But if he meant to shoot a real life image of these families in France ,, I wish i wouldn't have fell in that nest !! Orientalism-promoting+abuse in the sake of making money !! especially when it comes from an oriental director, in the west !!! I can imagine the success of this film in France and Europe… this is the way they like to see the orient ! and he supplied the best material for that ! endless scenes of shouting, belly dancing which made me not wanting to look at the screen anymore, full of shame !! The kids of the new generation in Frnace against the old one, endlessly teasing the father of the family.The editing was really bad. Long scenes. Interesting story and good actors but the emptiness prevails. Household super clichés and no proper ending after suffering for more than 2 hours ! My rate is 2-3 , the points are for the actors . A bad film .