Secret of the Grain
Saturday, 7:15 pm, Regal Downtown #3
Director: Abdel Kechiche
Writer: Abdel Kechiche
Cinematographer: Lubomir Bakchev
Cast: Hafsia Herzi, Hatika Karaoui, Bouraouïa Marzouk, Farida Benkhetache
Running Time: 151 min
Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche has directed only three films, and two of them, 2003’s L’Esquive (Games of Love and Chance) and this year’s La Graine et le Mulet (in English, Secret of the Grain, or, more accurately, Couscous), have won César Awards (the French equivalent of the Academy Award) for best French film.
Secret of the Grain follows the travails of Slimane (Habib Boufares), an immigrant worker on the upper end of middle age, who just had his shipyard job reduced to part time, as all the traditional jobs in his small town in the south of France are drying up. This only gives Slimane more time to brood about his divorce from Souad, his longtime wife, and the squabbles of his large family.
His children resent Slimane’s girlfriend and business partner, Latifa, manager of the hotel where he now lives. The only encouragement he receives comes from Rym, Latifa’s daughter (Hafsia Herzi, who won the “breakthrough actress” César for the role, a standout among a largely non-professional cast). The morose Slimane does have a dream: to refurbish an old boat into a North African restaurant, with ex-wife Souad as chef, specializing in the fish couscous (i.e., the grain and mullet of the title) that amounts to Tunisian comfort food.
It takes extraordinary physical effort to refinish the boat, and even more energy to persuade Souad to cooperate, especially since Slimane’s offer does not include reconciliation. Slimane must fight for money and battle the local bureaucrats who block his attempts to secure the necessary licenses and permits. Rym’s drive enables her to cut through the red tape as the jaded and submissive Slimane cannot, and the restaurant appears to be on its way.
The film culminates in Slimane’s grand opening night, when his invited guests are the very bureaucrats who have stood in his way. One should not imagine this as heartwarming fantasy about the power of food as everyone bonds over Souad’s remarkable fish couscous. The opening night party is a farce (Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw even likened it to a Fawlty Towers episode), but it moves the film toward a dark conclusion that Slimane could not have predicted.
Secret of the Grain is complex and rich not just in its depiction of the blending of cultures, but also in its dissection of universal family dynamics.
