How is it that the best movie of 2008 came out in the U.S. about a week before the start of 2009?
The film, “The Secret of the Grain,” from French Tunisian director Abdel Kechiche, tells the story of a family of French North Africans struggling to keep their family together as hard economic times unveil new challenges to their dreams of living as equals in French society.
It’s a political film if you want it to be, it’s a film about the pleasures of women and food, if you want it to be. But what makes “The Secret of the Grain” a landmark of synthetic verite cinema, a movie that feels disarmingly and uncannily like a documentary, is an absolutely absorbing (perhaps “granular”) level of detail that reveals the director’s extraordinary sensitivity to the microscopic social conflicts that take place at the intersection of work, citizenship, and love. The film shows how economic “uncertainty” functions as a catalyst for a general questioning of globalization and the assumptions of a culturally diverse society. It has a special sense of urgency, and at times feels as profoundly American as Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”
That is to say, it’s a raw piece of work and not easy to watch at times. Very long scenes that can feel like torture if you’re paying too close attention to the plot will challenge those with 140-character length attention spans. Kechiches relishes in the poetry of celluloid that would end up on a prudent documentarian’s cutting room floor. It begs audiences to settle into an excruciatingly slow pace of life, get bored a little, and stop asking: “What’s happening in this scene?” It’s not an easy thing to ask of an audience, but the pleasures are infinitely greater if you can, as in any movie, immerse yourself completely in its world.
2008 was a year when one could become addicted, sometimes unrepentently so, to social media. Via blackberry or iphone, e-mail, Facebook, twitter could be with you wherever you were: in a doctor’s office, on a blind date, in a movie theater, etc. Part of its fascination was a technology that could keep us all connected to each other. But does it keep people together? Or does it distract and disrupt from those who are physically among us? In “The Secret of the Grain,” sometimes it seems like the only pieces of modern technology are a boat, a moped, and a cell phone, and they are each a cause of both connection and disruption. The effect is carried through in the lack of moody non-diagetic music. Very little interferes with the continuum of what’s caught by the camera, making all the more dramatic a continuous performance during the final dinner party by a traditional North African band made up of characters in the film. The source of what entertains is living and breathing, improvised, and empathic and responsive to the drama swirling around it.
All this obsessive detail ultimately forces the audience to question the conventions that distinguish documentary from fiction film. The actors come across naturally, with imperfect bodies that sensuously hold the camera’s loving gaze like a Hollywood bombshell. The effect is a film that succeeds in breaking down some barriers, like that between subject from object: you are invited to relax in the company of this family that would otherwise be disconnected – both by force and by choice – from the society they are marginalized from. Without spoiling the film, disconnection from each other ultimately leads to the family’s downfall. Nothing is explained, and, as in life, we are left with unresolved plot lines, loose ends, and unanswerable questions.
No film fascinated me in quite so many ways in 2008 as “The Secret of the Grain.” [A] – Alex Sherman [ed. While ‘Grain’ might not make our top 10 of 2008, we fully endorse this opinion/review and think it’s certainly one of the more remarkable films of late 2008.]