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- Secret of the Grain
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Film review Secret of the Grain, published in AJDS Newsletter, April 2008
It was more than two hours with the Beijis in The Secret of the Grain, but I'd go back, like that! And not just for the food or the dummy-spits. If this glorious wingding of a film with its odd and superficially frustrating pulse occasionally tests one's patience, the rewards are worth it. Watching, one is propelled from dilemma to dilemma, given a treat, forced to wait and wait for a pause, then on again. Yes there's the central quest taking place in a small French port town, but the aim of Abedellatif Kechiche is to ultimately direct attention beyond the action and the two main axes of French/Algerian characters. The sixty-year-old Slimane connects the two groups: one of his ex-wife, their children, grandchildren and in-laws; the other his current lover and her daughter, with the town's bourgeois establishment in the background.
Slimane has worked in the shipyard for 35 years and is humiliated to find himself on the wrong end of its economic rationalistion. In a long scene he rides away from the docks to deliver to the families both his news and the fresh fish he's been given by sympathetic fisherman friends. All are caught in the middle of their messy lives: a rich soup of mostly female volubility, complaint, commentary, solidarity, performance, declamation. Slimane himself is elusive in his silence and stillness, the film conveying his importance through the behaviour of others: the adoring gaze of his baby granddaughter, the commentary of ageing unemployed musicians sitting by the river, his stepdaughter's commitment to his dream.
Slimane is of course absent from a great set piece lunch put on by his ex-wife, with extended family including a daughter's non-migrant husband, a cheating son's Russian wife. We are de facto guests in on it all: the allegiances, in-jokes, coercion to attend, absences, and anticipating eyes following the food. The non-Arab viewer is welcome and included—as the family laughs with, not at, the son-in-law's mispronunciation of an Arabic word.
Both family groups, and this watcher, are swept up by the Slimane project, and we want the town's establishment to open their eyes and ears, to taste that magic couscous. But it's they who are the outsiders, their resistance and racism delicately yet incisively exposed: 'In France we have laws about what you do in restaurant kitchens....' (this addressed to Slimane who's spent his adult life in France and to his French-born stepdaughter). The family response to hypocrisy is wit: 'they [town planners] don't care, unless it's a mosque!'
It's the women who propel the action and whose presence is most strongly experienced, through powerful scripting, acting and direction: whether 'in your face' or withdrawn and self-contained; whether taking charge, producing what women have always produced, hanging on to custom or chucking it in, screaming their powerlessness or breaking the mould. The Secret of the Grain encompasses both the adaptability and vulnerability of migrants. This is not the formulaic migration narrative that Maria Tumarkin refers to in her book Courage, that 'often portrays emigration as a form of overwhelming cataclysm, an experience that has little place for the migrant's agency'.
In several scenes that the audience sees but the other characters in the film can't, Kechiche points us beyond its frame and those scenes that have tested patience (Yes YES! We've got it!), into the future and to the hopes and fears of the first generation migrant for the young. We are left to ponder likely splits, sorrows, possible alliances and assertions. Who'll be able to grab at life, and who might fail? Who'll give it a good shake? The pulse of this film is a non-Western rhythmn: it seems to stand still and then suddenly it's moving, always forward away from itself. Like life.
The Secret of the Grain. France (2007) in French/Arabic.Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche.© Margaret Jacobs 2008