THE SECRET OF THE
GRAIN (LA GRAINE ET LE MULET)
Chale Nafus
Director of
Programming, Austin Film Society
If this film were a fable, the moral would be: It is not
easy to tie your boat up to a dock of the [French] Republic if you are old,
North African, and have a dream.
Abdellatif Kechiche decided that
his third film should focus on a family similar to the one he grew up in. “I
wanted to concentrate on the figure of the father Slimane, who is [laid off] from
his job in the shipyards, and who decides to set up a couscous restaurant on a
disused ship in the harbor. Slimane stands for my father and all those men of
that generation who left their country of origin and who went somewhere else in
order to work, so that the generations after them would have a better life. I
wanted to portray a man who would represent the heroic dimensions of what these
people did.”
In Kechiche’s case that is
exactly what happened. His family moved from Tunisia to Nice, France when Abdel
was six. And now after several decades of work in theater and film, Kechiche
has the “better life” desired for him by his father. In a way, La graine et
le mulet could be considered a “thank you”
note to his father and that generation of men and women immigrants now in their
50s and 60s who went as young adults to France in hopes of better lives, if not
for themselves, then for their children and grandchildren.
But Kechiche has purposely
avoided becoming typecast as a representative of cinema beur, a particularly French film genre having to do with
marginalized people, especially of North African descent from the Maghreb
(Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), and their lives and identity issues. The word beur is described as French slang for “Arab” and
“signifies the ambivalence associated with bicultural identity despite French
nationality.” It is apparently used more often to describe the children of
immigrants, the second generation which may find itself caught between two
cultures and in conflict with some of the values of their parents. That would be
the place Kechiche might find himself, also, but he prefers to declare himself
a French filmmaker. Consequently he made his characters in THE SECRET OF THE
GRAIN multi-dimensional, rather than “limit them to
socio-cultural archetypes or caricatures.” He clearly states: “I wanted to give
them more humanity that is usually done. These are men and women, not symbols.”
He also felt that he was countering French cinema’s myopia in “leaving out
whole swathes of the population.”
By
focusing on a 60-year-old boat repairman, Kechiche was able to explore one such
story of a man, who had spent 35 years working in France, but getting credit
toward his pension for less than half that time. During his early career he
would have been working “off the books.” Slimane is a taciturn man who rarely
expresses what he is feeling. He still sees his ex-wife and his children, but
they all have their own lives now. At some point he established a relationship
with a woman who runs a small hotel and café. She and her daughter Rym seem to
be the most loving people in Slimane’s life. But when he begins to work toward
his seemingly impossible dream, most of his family members, including his first
wife and all his children, as well as Rym, begin to help. There is one critical
exception.
As
with GAMES OF LOVE AND CHANCE, Kechiche worked primarily with inexperienced
actors in THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN. He has nothing against professional actors
and in fact loves working with some of them, but his production method takes a
long time: “It requires that the actors be available and able to spend
months with me to rehearse. Professional actors can't stay because they have
other contracts, because the trade requires a lot of time.
A working actor can't give six or seven months of his time to a film. They must
work. They must earn a living. They must manage their careers. I need a lot of
time to work with actors to bring out that energy, to bring out that life.”
Casting
took a long time, first for conducting auditions and then considering each possibility,
because there were “so many fascinating people.” Unlike with GAMES OF LOVE AND
CHANCE, here Kechiche chose people who could identify with the characters. As
so many directors have said, correct casting is one of the major elements in
the success or failure of a film. Kechiche concurs: “The choice of an
actor is crucial – a false note even in a small role can trip the whole thing
up.”
Once the cast was set, there was
almost an immediate setback with the death of the man chosen to play the
principal role of Slimane. Fortunately for the production Kechiche had in mind
a perfect replacement, Habib Boufares, who had worked alongside Kechiche’s
father in construction. Boufares was a man of as few words as his proposed
character Slimane, but what a perfect face for the part – weathered with looks
alternating between defeat, defiance, love, and sadness.
Hafsia Herzi, who plays the
pivotal role of Rym, daughter of the hotelkeeper, had very little training in
acting. She was apparently hoping for a part as an extra in Kechiche’s film,
nothing more. But the director saw something in her that he could use. He even
reportedly expanded the role of Rym to make use of Herzi’s special qualities
and abilities. She didn’t really know much about belly dancing but once it
became clear that her character might “save the day” by stalling for time
through that beguiling dance, she spent several hours every day learning and
practicing.
Rehearsals, where the actors
really get to know their characters and one another as well as the director,
provided the foundation of the film. The director even brought in the crew
during rehearsals, with no film being shot, but just so “barriers can come down
and people can trust each other.” No wonder the scenes flow so effortlessly as
the actors seem to really inhabit their characters and know each other so well,
just like family members.
Kechiche loves writing as much as
directing. “I never studied in
university. I am not a sociologist. But I want to show the beauty of that
language so close to me, the one I always heard. Writing dialogue is a real
pleasure. I work on the text, I speak it out loud, I listen to it and adapt it
to the actor who is going to say the words. It is a very long process of
creation and recreation.”
One
critic pointed out that Abdel Kechiche clearly belongs within the tradition of
dialogue-rich French cinema, one dependent on words as well as on visuals. His
predecessors are enumerated: Renoir, Pialat, Pagnol, and Sautet. In fact, they
were among those directors who gave the adolescent Kechiche so much pleasure at
the cinema, but initially it was favorite actors who made Kechiche learn about
the directors: Raimu leading to Pagnol, Michel Simon to Renoir, etc. At first
Kechiche wanted to be an actor (a profession which he certainly accomplished),
because directing seemed so mysterious to him. But once he had appeared in a
film in 1983 (LA THE A LA MENTHE, Abdelkrim Bahloul), he became interested in
the idea of directing. Fifteen years had to pass before he could do so.
There was little doubt about
where SECRET OF THE GRAIN would be set – in the Mediterranean French seaport of
Sète, a place Kechiche knew very well since he had grown up there. He also
chose that location because it hadn’t been represented on film before. “I think
that when you make a film about a world you know very well and that you love
and care about, that is communicated in the film, and other people are able to
identify with what they’re seeing.”
Besides being very enamored of a
dialogue-driven style, Kechiche is very conscious of the look of this film. He
considers himself very classical in style, moving from long shot to close-ups.
In scenes with lots of people, talk, and movement (at a large family meal or in
the restaurant on the boat), there might seem to be multiple cameras, but he
employed two and sometimes just one camera. Still, every character gets his/her
time on screen.
Such a shooting style is a very
time-consuming process with so many set-ups and shots. He admits that even a
3-second shot might take 3, 4, or (Good God!) 15 hours to capture. And he
purposely stretches out the length of some of the scenes. Some, particularly
American, viewers, might find such scenes tedious and interminable. But being
immersed in a large family scene, we are very much part of it, looking at and
listening to this character and that one, while observing and tangibly feeling
the dynamics of three generations of a family, all brimming over with emotional
baggage, fond memories, and present concerns. It is a style of filming that
Kechiche has loved in other directors’ work for a long time: “It's a pleasure
that's difficult to explain, the desire to stay on a face, or a mouth munching
or laughing.” This is a place that film becomes more like a novel, a leisurely
sitting down and observing all that is going on around the character and the
reader/viewer. Kechiche recognizes the dangers of such a filming style: “I know
it's not always easy on the viewers but I felt that if I could get them ‘inside’
the film they wouldn't find it unsettling. On the contrary, it would become a
game between the audience and me where they would wonder when the scene will
end, unconsciously. Every time they feel it may stop, something new appears and
makes them want to go on watching.”
With this in mind, it is no
surprise that the dinner scene [on the boat] took a month to shoot. Each table
had a conversation going on. So that the actors wouldn’t be overly conscious of
the camera, there were always two cameras running, one handheld and ready to
capture any interesting moment.
A final word about the title. In
French it is La Graine et le mullet, which
refers to the semolina wheat used in couscous and the mullet fish that Slimane
takes to his first wife, to his daughter, and to his second family, with
varying levels of disinterest. Kechiche describes the mullet as a
fish which is not held in high regard but is very stubborn. In a way, that
would describe Slimane.
Sources