Some twenty years ago, Matt Groening produced a parody of a typical film festival brochure that was full of such titles as "Land of Ice, Land of Sighs." The title The Secret of the Grain is almost as perfect in conjuring up exactly what people who don't see many foreign films dread they must be like. ("Grain! Why will you not grow so that I can feed my family!? What is your secret!?") It turns out that the movie isn't set on a barren plain ravaged by drought but in contemporary France, and the plot is something of a traditional family farce, though it's debatable whether the writer-director, Abdellatif Kechiche (Games of Love and Chance) understands just how traditional and just how farcical. His hero is Beiji (Habib Boufares), a sixty-year-old manual laborer with a sprawling Franco-Arab family of friends and kinfolk. When his already meager work opportunities go-getting stepdaughter, and when the screen is filled with people with resentments and competing agendas--as in the opening-night sequence that takes up most of the last hour, with Beiji's daughters from his first marriage hissing bitchy remarks about their mother's replacement behind her back-- things even spark a little, thought they never quite catch fire. At its best, it's a pretty fair example of what Quentin Tarantino calls a "hang-out movie." But its digressionary charms and lulling rhythms work against it both as a piece of storytelling and as a comedy. They don't always work to the performers' advantage, either. There are awful lot of scenes where the characters have one point to make, and they make it, and then the scene just keeps rolling along while they make it again and again in as many different words as Kechiche can think up. (And The Secret of the Grain runs two and a half hours.) There's a not untypical scene towards the end, where Beiji, who is in desperate trouble and looking for his son, barges in on his daughter-in-law, who is in tears over her husband's infidelities. She gets to deliver a very long (and very repetitive) monologue, with much sniffling and weeping in tight close-up, while Beiji, who is in the rush of his life, just stands there and listens to her. At least when this sort of thing happens in a Hollywood movie. you know why: the director is imagining hearing the title of his movie be read aloud and preceded by the words, "The award for Best Supporting Actress goes to..." But here, the director's Altmanesque belief in bestowing equal time on his minor characters has gone a little haywire.
Meanwhile, back at the restaurant, the pacing is still overdeliberate and "novelistic", but the action is being dredged up from classic episodes of Fawlty Towers. (But this movie by itself is almost half as long as the entire run of that series.) And whoever did the subtitles for the English language edition didn't have to work quite so hard. I don't speak French, but having seen a few movies in my time, I didn't really need the subtitles to know that, as things started going wrong, the extras were saying things like, "Two hours waiting for a cous-cous dish!" and "His new business is getting off to a bad start!" and "I'll never come here again, that's for sure!" and "Sock her blue! Never before have I been asked to accept so long a hiatus between meals while awaiting an albeit delicious fish delicacy! De Gaulle would not have stood for it, nor would Depardieu if he were peckish, I wager!" (Screengrab Quiz: I made one of those lines up. Guess which one and win a dream date with Leonard Pierce!) The movie ends with a final stroke that is intended as black comedy, playful slapstick, or a sudden leap in tragedy, but damned if I know for sure which, and I don't think that counts as deliberate artistic ambiguity.