French film The Secret of the Grain is a raw, engrossing family drama.
There is something about nail-biting endings that leaves you disappointed as the credits roll, waiting for more. This week’s French offering at the cinemas, The Secret of the Grain, is impossibly racy towards the finish; a raw, engrossing family drama, originally titled La Graine et le mulet. Writer-director Abdel Kechiche brings his Tunisian roots to this story set by the coast in southern France.
Work is slow at the shipyard in the port of Sète, and 61-year-old Tunisian immigrant Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares), Beiji as everyone calls him, is laid off from his job. What follows is a close-up of his complicated family life, not one but two. Family number one is partly severed, though his ex-wife still sends her much-acclaimed family-time fish couscous across to him every Sunday. His four grown-up children, who live close to the mother, are concerned about Beiji’s failing professional life and suggest that he returns to Tunisia and starts afresh.
Instead, Beiji finds solace in his other family who he lives with, his girlfriend Lafita who runs a dilapidated hotel, and her young, fiery daughter Rym (Hafsia Herzi). Rym helps Beiji with his ambition of turning an old, wrecked boat into a boat restaurant. The unlikely duo go from door to door, office to office, seeking loan, authorisation and health certificates, facing obstacles that they had not accounted for in their original plan. The peg of their restaurant — to serve ex-wife Souad’s fish couscous as the star dish of the restaurant.
While it looks unlikely the venture will take off, Beiji decides to throw a gala dinner on the boat putting every penny that he has into it, to bring in investment. His entire family and Rym generously take charge of the evening, clearly the most important evening of his life.
While everybody gets tipsy and merry, they wait impatiently for the star dish of the evening to be served, the fish couscous, which, unfortunately, is discovered by the family to have gone missing by mistake. Attempts are made desperately to fix the situation, which can prove disastrous for Beiji’s already dim career and dipping morale. Who finally leaves aside petty differences and their honour to stand up for Beiji? This makes for an interesting watch.
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The dialogues in this film are in real-time and raw so you immediately connect. A few scenes portraying family arguments are stretched to a point where you stop feeling like a spectator and more a part of the on-screen squabbling family. Grievances are real and overwhelming, be it over an insufferable, cheating husband or a two-year-old child who refuses to grow out of her diapers. But the situations are also noisy, and at times, harsh.
Extreme close-ups, jarring frames and shaky camera movements could seem orthodox, which could just be a reflection of the fraught relationships in the film. The feisty Rym who is Beiji's unconditional support and his striking daughter Karima (Farida Benkhetache) are impressive and powerful women struggling to bring a sense of normalcy to family ties. Protagonist Beiji is worth a mention: he communicates the heavy load on his shoulders with a straight face, almost expressionless, and mild mannerisms. That’s his strength — the calm in a storm. His internal struggle is not unusual, we are all caught between what we love and lose.
