The Film
Abdellatif Kechiche’s The Secret of the Grain is an absorbing film, transforming long stretches of potent familial drama into a suspense thriller to rival all others. The film’s intimate approach discovers both tension and a kind of joyful exhilaration in ordinary family gatherings, using long takes and longer scenes that allow these emotions to bubble up to the surface, not unlike Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married.
Here, we have a film where food is both a character and a catalyst — the original French title translates to The Grain and the Mullet — and the titular couscous and fish goes hand-in-hand with characters’ complex relationships and aspirations.
Habib Boufares stars as Slimane, the patriarch of a large French Arab family — he still tries to provide for them as much as possible, but he’s largely estranged, divorced from ex-wife Souad (Bouraouia Marzouk) and not terribly close with any of his children. His closest relationship lies with Rym (Hafsia Herzi), the daughter of Slimane’s landlord, Latifa (Hatika Karaoui), a woman he’s also sleeping with in what is largely a relationship of convenience.
When Slimane loses his longtime shipbuilding job, he quietly pursues reinventing himself, planning to open a dockside restaurant on a rickety old boat he acquired. Rym provides guidance for jumping through the legal hoops, while Souad’s legendary couscous and mullet are to be the centerpiece of the restaurant’s menu. The preparation culminates in a pre-opening dinner where Slimane gathers the city’s necessary power players to convince them that his idea is economically viable.
What results is a thrilling climactic sequence where infidelity, racial and class differences, a missing pot of couscous, and belly dancing converge to great comic and tragic effect. The entire film builds up to this finale, but it’s an absolute pleasure throughout, with an earlier mealtime scene that reveals the interpersonal friction that sharing food can bring out and mirrors the climax.
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