Immediately following the certificate of the BBFC this film proudly displayed its awards from the Venice Film Festival and the Césars. A lot of people must have been on a serious amount of drugs to give this atrocious film any award with "best" in front of it.
The plot is that a 61 year old man who works at the docks is in the process of being pushed out of his job. He has a family to support via his estranged wife and also a new family with his lover and her daughter. When the inevitable happens and he accepts redundancy, he decides to open a restaurant on a boat selling his ex-wife's wonderful couscous.
The film is monumentally bad, it's a series of scenes of people bitching and whining and arguing, all whilst being raped in almost constant close ups by a director showing an alarming lack of artistry for a man so lauded. Thinking just within the realms of French cinema, even a man I have no love for whatsoever like Jean-Luc Godard in Le Mépris could frame a half-hour argument and make it cinematic, show the peaks and troughs and insert interesting things to make it *about* something annoyingly frustrating rather than making watching it annoyingly frustrating. This though is a continuous onslaught of brutal close ups of whinging gits clumsily chopped together.
It's relentless and by the end becomes an arm-chewingly gnawing exercise in cross cutting between the "big night" (Oh that is was like that wonderful Stanley Tucci film of that title) and the effects of the family's behaviour. One subplot following one of the sons who is cheating on his wife is particularly lazy writing as it requires a momumental coincidence to kick start the "fun" (or complete lack of it) on the night and also his wife's knowledge of this is included in the film for the SOLE reason so we can have a close up of her face while she shouts at the helpless Dad for 5 minutes in an excruciatingly unwatchable scene. Then he leaves and makes the audience jealous as they can only lament that they hadn't thought of doing that themselves earlier.
This is an unbearably annoying film littered with characters whose sole job is to bitch and moan to and at the old man, and he just quietly takes it. Sadly the writer/director Abdel Kechiche seems to have enough contempt for his audience to assume they will condescend to do the same. His idea of drama is to have people shouting at each other, his idea of pacing a film (that comes in a good hour overlong at 150 minutes) is completely non-existant, as is his ability to end the film or whip it up into a crescendo of anything other than frustration for the viewer.
The girl in it is attractive in a dirty way and Kechiche knows it and exploits it. She's the only redeeming feature of this utterly appalling insult to celluloid. The final half hour or so is a prime example of how to cut your film off at the knees via cross cutting and do so in an incompetent way which takes any drama in the situation and not just kills it, but kidnaps it, tortures it, sets fire to it, pisses on it, then kills it, then to boot skull-fucks it and buries the remains under the floor in the basement. That Nadine Labaki (in Caramel) can have a grasp of the technique in her debut film and this overpraised chucklehead can have no idea how to use it properly at all is all the more embarrassing for this unendingly poor excuse of a film. I doubt I could recommend this film to anything or anyone except for the trash-can, but even then I'd do so apologising to the trash can. Beyond awful.