All In the Family: Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le Mulet (The Secret of the Grain)

Abdellatif Kechiche’s award-winning 2007 film, La Graine et le Mulet (The Secret of the Grain), included in the Criterion collection three years after its release, attracted over a million spectators by the time it ended its box-office run in France, making it one of the few recent French films to attain both popular and artistic success. Such success is particularly unusual for a director who focuses his attention on Maghrebian immigrants in France. Yet Kechiche’s film connects with the realities of contemporary French life in a way that goes beyond the immigrant family in which it finds its center.

Kechiche’s success is quite obviously due to his particular talents, as both scriptwriter and director, and his skill in bringing together the memories of his childhood with people able to give them life on the screen. In this film Kechiche employs his unique ability to identify and train non-professional actors: Habib Boufares, who plays the central character Slimane, was a longtime family friend who had worked with Kechiche’s father on construction jobs, like the character he plays. Also without previous training as an actress, Hafsia Herzi plays the role of an adoptive daughter to Slimane, which won her the French César award for Most Promising Actress.

Two scenes dominate the film. In the lengthy Sunday dinner scene, the conversation focuses on the familiar French topics of food and love, although the food is Tunisian and the love often unites people of different immigrant backgrounds. And in the film’s culminating scene, the young Rym performs a slow and sensual belly dance while Slimane frantically attempts to recover the couscous for his new restaurant’s opening banquet. While seen by some critics as orientalist, Rym’s dance offers testimony to her love for her adoptive father and her attachment to the traditional music of her ancestral Arabic culture.