THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN ssss WRITTEN AND Directed by ABDELLATIF KECHICHE
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In The Secret of the Grain, which opens this week at the Music Box, Kechiche moves from these metaphorical families to a real one. Slimane (Habib Boufares), a weathered Arab shipyard worker in the southern port of Sète, is father to two sons and five daughters, most of them grown. But he’s divorced from his wife and living in a cheap hotel, where he shares the bed of the middle-aged owner (Hatika Karaoui) and enjoys the adoration of her headstrong 20-year-old daughter (Hafsia Herzi). Kechiche, who was born in Tunisia and immigrated to France with his parents, draws on his own experience to create a family saga as rich in personal and cultural detail as a Victorian novel, his wallpaper a series of long, charged, loosely improvised family gatherings. The Secret of the Grain may touch on wider aspects of the Franco-Arab experience, its characters angrily denouncing or patiently negotiating the insults and strictures of white authority, but it’s primarily the story of a clan, with all the enforced loyalty and buried resentments that word suggests.
The Secret of the Grain runs 151 minutes and maintains a languid pace for the first 90, as Kechiche brings Slimane’s children into focus, revealing the outlines of their parents’ bad marriage. Karima is loud and willful like her mother, Souad (Bouraouia Marzouk). Riadh (Mohamed Benabdeslem), the younger boy, has inherited Slimane’s gentleness and generosity; Majid (Sami Zitouni), the elder son, who lives upstairs from his mother with his Russian immigrant wife and infant child, shares his father’s adulterous urges. In the movie’s opening scene, Kechiche focuses on a woman’s leg peeking from a slit skirt and pans down to her pointed black shoe; she’s a customer aboard a boat tour of the harbor, and Majid, who makes his living as a tour guide, takes her downstairs for some slap and tickle. Karima reads Majid the riot act about his infidelity, but for the most part the family protects him from outsiders, trying to ignore his moral flaws as they did Slimane’s.
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