The French filmmaker Claude Berri passed away this week at age 74.  One of the most esteemed figures in the national cinema of the 1980s, Berri was a total package as a filmmaker:  he was a highly celebrated director, who won an Oscar and was nominated for a dozen Cesar awards, though he won none; he was an actor of no small talent; he was a skillful screenwriter; and even in the days when his best days as a director were behind him, he served as a producer for a number of influential and important films.

Berri was born to a Jewish family in Paris, and his entire family was immersed in the film industry.  His sister, Arlette Langmann, is a notable French screenwriter and film editor; his brother-in-laws are director Jean-Pierre Rassam and producer Paul Rassam; and two of his sons (Julien Rassam and Thomas Langmann) and one of his nephews (Dmitri Rassam) are actors.  Best known for his films Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, he won his Academy Award for the short film Le Poulet when he was 32 years old.  As a producer, he worked on a range of projects, from Roman Polanski's Tess to Abdel-Latif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain. 

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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."

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