The Secret of the Grain (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007)

Hafsia Herzi and Habib Boufares in The Secret of the Grain

Cast: Habib Boufares, Hafsia Herzi, Farida Benkhetache, Abdelhamid Aktouche, Alice Houri, Bouraouïa Marzouk, Cyril Favre, Leila D'Issernio, Abelkader Djeloulli, Bruno Lochet, Olivier Loustau, Sami Zitouni, Sabrina Ouazani, Mohamed Benabdeslem. Screenplay: Abdellatif Kechiche, Ghalia Lacroix. Cinematography: Lubomir Bakchev. Production design: Benoît Barouh. Film editing: Ghalia Lacroix, Camille Toubis.

With its unsparing closeups and its two great extended sequences, the family dinner and the restaurant tryout, The Secret of the Grain is obviously designed to be an immersive film.  Sometimes it calls to mind the Italian neo-realists with its focus on ordinary people and their doggedness in the face of social circumstance, but it's "realer" than those films, with an improvisatory quality in its best scenes that evokes the films of Mike Leigh. Best of all, it plunks you right in the middle of a culture, that of North African immigrants living in France, and lets you find your footing in it. The focus of the film is Slimane (Habib Boufares), a 60-something worker in the shipyards of Sète, a small Mediterranean port city explored more than half a century ago by Agnès Varda in La Point Courte (1955). (In that film the exploration was done by outsiders, a Parisian couple. In this case, the city is seen from the point of view of residents with one foot in their original Arab culture, the other in the adopted culture of France -- people who are both insiders and outsiders.) Slimane is being laid off as the film begins, but he doesn't relish the prospect of retirement. Instead, he wants to open a restaurant on an old ship he has acquired. He's aided in this plan by Rym (Hafsia Herzi), the young daughter of his mistress, who owns the hotel where Slimane lives. Rym helps him put together a prospectus that they present to a skeptical but intrigued bank loan officer. Complications are inevitable because Slimane wants the restaurant to feature couscous and fish as prepared by his ex-wife, Souad (Bouraouïa Marzouk). And so we're drawn into the lives of Slimane's doubly extended family, whom we meet at a dinner in Souad's home. The Franco-Arab mixture is enriched by a touch of Russian: Souad and Slimane's daughter-in-law, Julia (Alice Houri), married to the philandering Majid (Sami Zitouni). These and other characters get introduced to us in various ways, but primarily at the raucous, noisy family dinner. Eventually, Slimane decides that the only way around the bank's reluctance and the bureaucracy's red-tape about permits, is to stage a party on the ship and invite bankers, bureaucrats, and potential investors and to serve them Souad's couscous and fish. Abdellatif Kechiche is a master at working out all the complicated relationships of family and town, and at setting up the eventual roadblocks that constitute the plot, but he also lets his actors carry the emotional burden of the story, which they do superbly. I have to admit that The Secret of the Grain sometimes feels like a party you want to leave but can't. That's partly because of its 151-minute run time -- I felt like it could lose half an hour without diminishing its immersiveness, the suspense of the last section of the film, and its overall tragicomic effect. But I would hate to be the one who had to decide which of its often astonishing scenes to cut.