So how much do diapers cost? And what will be the cost of diapers for say a 2 year period till a child gets potty trained? And do the diaper manufacturers not ill serve mothers by making them so dry and absorbent that the kids refuse to start appreciating the alternative?And yes they serve as great shock absorbers when kids take a tumble.Calculators are pulled out and the math is done, 7200 Euros for one year, it emerges, a small fortune for struggling immigrants. All this detailed discussion is just one tiny piece from this big film directed by the emerging French auteur Abdellatif Kechiche.The discussion is happening at a Sunday family lunch in the home of a Tunisian immigrant family in a small port city in southern France.Everybody is there, the three daughters, their husbands,children,two brothers and the formidable mother who has prepared her signature dish, fish couscous, except for the father. In a world becoming stubbornly cosmopolitan and westernized the scene of the family eating the couscous noisily, messily and with great relish is heartening. We see the father a little later as his two sons arrive at his squalid hotel room to give him a take away portion.He eats this with a quiet satisfaction. Rym(Hafsia Herzi),who is the young vivacious daughter of the beautiful middle-aged owner of the hotel with whom the father Slimane(Habib Boufares ) is having a relationship, which perhaps divided his family, shares the meal.The film centers around the efforts of an old and out of work Slimane to convert a rusty decrepit boat into a speciality couscous restaurant.In his efforts he will receive extraordinary support from both his families and many friends.At he heart of the moral dialogue in the film is the profound decency of Slimane, his doggedness, his complete understanding of the compromises involved in being a struggling immigrant and his steadfast adherence to his duty.He knows his limitations and makes his life useful to his family at an old age, in ways that they acknowledge, when the easy thing for them would have been to sideline him from their lives.His daughters adore him and rally around him in his hard times.They clearly have theirs hearts in the right place.We see his first wife walking quite a distance to give a plate of the couscous to a homeless man.It reminded me of the custom in many Indian homes to reserve the first chapatti (indian Bread) for a cow and the last one for stray dogs. As a kid I was terrified of this chore of taking the chapattis to the stray animals but looking back I see it as a custom which built in compassion for animals in our daily life.The acting which is uniformly superb by the leads Habib Boufares and Hafsia Herzi, as well as the supporting cast, is a collage of neorealist, formalist and melodramatic elements. Rym played the sensational Hefsia Herzi is the real surprise in the film.Her devotion to her mothers old companion, whom she treats with love and respect, and the lengths to which both her character and Ms Herzi go, bring immense joy to the film.Perhaps its her love which provides Slimane with the strength to pursue his dream of opening a restaurant on a boat.In the extraordinarily detailed final sequence we see a performance of very sensuous belly dancing by the nubile Rym, as she tries desperately to hold the attention of the irritated restaurant guests who are tired of waiting for the main dish of couscous.As she performs the musicians who are mostly old men who stay at her mothers hotel, play for her as they would for a professional. This is also an interesting take on how old men look at young women who are obviously sexually attractive, this scene provides a very civilized and dignified answer.The film has many long and fully fleshed out scenes, all of which are spectacular in themselves but when they are strung together in a film of this length, it begins to wear us down a bit.The film is raw – in content , tone, texture, performances, dialogue,locations and its use of a fluid hand-held digital camera format.Inside its rawness it hides pleasures as wholesome and nutritious as the fish couscous that lends the film its title, but I am afraid this film will end up dividing the audiences into those who completely immerse themselves in its voluptuousness and those who wish for a more economical and smooth treatment of this fertile material.Surely the director is aware of the perils of his strategy of not holding back, of showing us exactly what he wants to, and this makes this a very brave film.The film is set in Sete, a slightly rundown but beautiful port city in southern France, that I used to make business trips to. Watching this film brought back pleasant memories of the Mediterranean sea that provides a constant backdrop to the film.The sea is what both separates and links Europe and Africa, historically the oppressor and the oppressed.Does Mr Kechiche want to convey this group of immigrants as being the representative samples of the North African immigrants? We do not know. But as an intimate case study it will serve as an important artistic marker in Frances struggle to come to terms with its colonial past and the needs of a modern French society, in a post 9/11 world, to banish symbols of conservative Islamic beliefs such as the headscarf.Cinema cannot offer solutions, just mirrors, and this film is a finely embellished one.First published on my blog mostlycinema.com

About half an hour in i was saying to myself: This is why i watch foreign films; they drop me into ordinary small bits of life all over the world. How people genuinely live, how they actually (have to) work, all those real to life messy relationships. And here we have all this close-up claustrophobic intimacy, the mix and mess of family and friends, of a close-knit community of people living around one another, eating together, making music, dancing, arguing, bantering, laughing. I was enjoying it.I was still enjoying it an hour in. Especially as Hafsia Herzi (as Rym) was coming more into the story; what a lively, sexy, feisty, firecracker she is. And old Slimane was reminding me of my quiet old granddad (with his budgie in the cage by the open window facing out to the harbour) I liked being in this salty Mediterranean "reality".But the second half of the film slowly slid my interest away. I'm becoming aware of how overly extended scenes are getting (do we have to see every pot being carried out of that car?) Dialogues are running repetitively into one another, with much shouting and wailing. Crude melodrama is starting to become the predominant driver of the narrative.Disappointingly, the film has felt like it's lost its way – and I've lost sympathy with both the characters and the plot they're in. The boat restaurant scenes at the end – Ryms belly dancing for example – and sad Slimane running around and around in hopeless circles after the jeering kids on his stolen bike – have become far too farcical.Its a real let down when a film, especially a long film like this, fails to deliver what it was promising. All that couscous, just slopped wastefully out onto the floor.(For the first hour about a 7; and the other hour and a half is about a 4)

Realism can sometimes deepen a film by drawing from the ordinary events in our experience that surprise us, make us think, change our perspective, or otherwise entertain us. "The Secret of the Grain" is one of those films that tries to use simple daily happenings as raw material to let us observe a time slice of another culture. It takes awhile for the film to strike a chord due to some early self indulgent pacing. But when it focuses on Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares), a 61 year old Maghreb (North African) immigrant and 35 year ship worker (at a French port city), it curiously becomes inspiring and gripping.Slimane is a crafty handy man with a no nonsense kind of stoicism. He's the sort of person who stares at his boss or relatives blankly as they go through emotional extremes. And they often go ballistic. He saves one of his granddaughters from her angry mother, who was scolding her daughter for not using the toilet (and going through all their expensive diapers). His boss looks quite unhinged and demands Slimane to stick to a set work schedule. Slimane's ex-wife wants her unpaid alimony instead of the free fish he keeps bringing. And so on with other members of his large extended family. Abdel Kechiche's film avoids preaching to the viewers, but each of these encounters has its own lesson, such as deceitful consumerism, French prejudice, fractured relationships, family loyalty, traditional values, friendship, and bureaucratic red tape.The little details draw us in and force us to marvel at Slimane's almost romantic initiative. Instead of accepting reduced hours on his already tight income, Slimane quits his job to open a couscous restaurant on a ship he owns. First he has to restore the decrepit ship, mostly on his own with a bit of help from his son, Riadh (Mohamed Benabdeslem). He works nonstop on cigarettes and coffee. He has no experience running a business, but he takes a leap of faith, drawing on his immense creative experience as a shipbuilder. It translates well to designing a classy restaurant, especially absent a narrow minded boss setting time schedules and trying to limit workers to minimal hours/wages.It's a family affair from the beginning. Rym (Hafsia Herzi), the daughter of Slimane's new girlfriend, helps navigate him through the process to get a bank loan and apply for licenses. Hafsia Herzi is a French actress on the rise, but it looks like she's keeping to French films for now. Her character, Rym, is better at communication than him, and she provides energetic encouragement along the way. She becomes crucial to the opening of the restaurant when problems arise, with a completely unexpected belly dance in seductive red (predictably you can find her dance on You Tube). Good thing the customers were well on their way to drunkenness, or else they might have thought such a dance was inappropriate at a professional restaurant.As you see, the film has its share of fun twists that hold your curiosity to see whether the family can make the restaurant successful. Some of the daughters and servers think evil spirits keep getting in the way to punish them for their faults (such as Slimane's ex-wife supporting him as the head cook, angering his current girlfriend and hotel owner). If any of these events have a sense of comic weirdness, it just shows that real life is a constant source for strange happenings that sometimes seem more original than the imaginings of a writer.However, sometimes the camera is quite boring as a guide through the first half of the movie. Not every daily ritual critically captures the substance of a culture. The film's slow pacing through dinner conversations and diaper price complaints isn't realistic in the least. Life is slower, more diverse, more subjective (you get to choose to ignore or tune out certain people, talk to others, and look around at your whim), and less queasy (the camera slightly shakes like a hand held). The eye of the camera zooms in close to empathize with its choice of faces like a single player video game. One scene in particular of a family gathered around a dinner table talking and eating was something close to visual torture.Its mimicry of realism pays off in the second half of the film, however. It has an inspiring story of an older immigrant (Slimane) taking a chance for the sake of his kids. He wants to pass along his business with an admirable desire to improve their collective situations. He takes in their outrage and outbursts, but instead of raging against the world like them, he acts with his craftsman hands to change the fundamental tension of their near poverty. Is the lesson that immigrants make some of the best entrepreneurs as they transform their suffering (a common source for creative and productive energy) into opportunities to overcome obstacles? It's not a preachy film meant for such arguments, but it allows plenty of room for further discussion. It has important lessons about cultural tolerance, family cohesion through adversity, and the plight of average workers.The film's title, "The Secret of the Grain", is awful to say the least. It makes you think of farmers, not couscous and mullet, the main specialty of Slimane's ex-wife (and thus his restaurant). The German title is more explicit and literal: "Couscous with Fish" (Couscous mit Fisch). The UK and Spanish title cut off the fish part with "Couscous". In any case, it's a family drama set at a fishing port, far from the rural country, and it's well worth checking out.

THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN (LA GRAINE ET LE MULET) as written and directed by Abdellatif Kechiche offers the viewer a different version of the importance of family and the need to bond for survival. Kechiche is known for casting his films with unknown actors (or even fist time actors) and while some may view this as self-indulgent exercise in proving that a film can be made without the aid of a talented cast, others will appreciate the fine performances he is able to draw from both unknowns (Habib Boufares) and stars on the rise (Hafsia Herzi). The story is fairly straightforward (despite the fact that it takes 2 1/2 hours to tell!): in the Southern France port city of Sète, populated with many French-speaking Arab immigrants who eke out a living repairing boats and fishing, lives senior citizen Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares) and his friends and family - an ex-wife chronically angry about missed alimony payments, an adulterer son, and girlfriend who satisfies him and also has a daughter Rym (Hafsia Herzl) who adores him. Slimane struggles with his job, has his hours cut back severely, and together with his friends who also are suffering economically, bond more strongly. Eventually Slimane comes upon the idea of establishing a restaurant housed in a deserted old ship that he purchases and with the help from his family and his friends (especially supported by Rym) he opens his restaurant that features the fish with couscous recipe of his ex-wife. The reason this too-long film ultimately satisfies is the completely spontaneous atmosphere created by director Kechiche: the dialogue feels completely improvised, as though we happen to be passing by Sète and overheard a colony of down and out immigrants from North Africa transform their fates. It may take a lot of patience to sit through the first half of the film, but the end result is rewarding. Grady Harp