European Film Award of the Critics 2008 – Prix FIPRESCI

Abdellatif Kechiche, "The Secret of the Grain – Couscous"
By Hassouna Mansouri

By giving this year's prize to Abdellatif Kechiche, the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) recognises an author in the purest and simplest meaning of the word. The award not only pays tribute to all those film-makers who are often marginalised because of their origins, but above all recognises the talent of those who are committed to a different and independent cinema; those who stand against the war machines and their grip on the industry of the image. With low-budget films — which are none the less difficult to finance — Kechiche is involved in a struggle which brings together classic texts like those of Marivaux with the young 'beurs' of Nice, the city where he grew up.

Like many great film-makers, Kechiche owes a great deal to the theatre. That is where he took his first steps a few years after landing on the French Côte d'Azur from Tunis, his hometown. His first performances as an actor swiftly established his reputation and, as early as 1981, he directed The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria by Fernando Arrabal, the Spanish playwright, in Avignon.

Kechiche made his debut on the big screen when Abdelkrim Bahloul, another Maghrebian film-maker, cast him in Le thé à la menthe (1984). André Téchiné was the next to take note, casting him alongside such great French actors as Claude Brialy and Sandrine Bonnaire in Les innocents (The Innocents, 1987). For his performance in Bezness (Business, 1992), a film by his compatriot Nouri Bouzid, Kechiche won Best Actor at the Francophone Film Festival in Namur.

During the 1990s, Kechiche was seen less frequently on screen. But, in 2000, La faute à Voltaire (Blame It on Voltaire), his first film as a director, made up for all those years of absence and immediately showed what a talented director he was. The story of Jalel, a young illegal immigrant from Tunisia, was a success. Kechiche was recognised as a young talent at the Venice Film Festival, where he received the Golden Lion for the Best First Film in September 2000, and went on to win several awards at other festivals such as Namur, Angers and Cologne.

Four years later, L'esquive (Games of Love and Chance) showed that the success of the previous film was no accident. The story of a group of teenagers rehearsing Le jeu de l'amour et du hasard, a classic French play by Marivaux, it received a standing ovation at the French Césars ceremony, where the film won four trophies. It went on to pick up further awards at international festivals in Stockholm and Turin.

Like L'esquive, La graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain, also Couscous) won four Césars (Best French Film of the Year, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Female Newcomer). By then, it had already won Best Newcomer, the Special Jury Prize and the International Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival. Kechiche's third film is a proof of maturity that deserves professional respect, public appreciation and critical acclaim. Its style plays on the expectations of the audience and, at the same time, brings something new by challenging stereotypes and inviting us to question our prejudices. That is what makes The Secret of the Grain/Couscous of interest.

What could be more of a cliché than a film made by a Tunisian film-maker about couscous? But cultural and anthropological considerations cannot compete with the way Kechiche uses this emblem of the culinary culture of Maghrebian societies: the whole film is structured around the Sunday meal, and Kechiche uses this typical Tunisian tradition as a focal point for a subtle examination of integration.

The issue is never to the fore, but it is always there, mixed in with other problems of French society. From every simple word and every banal situation emerge the nightmares of a society that does not assimilate its multiculturalism. The contradictions of that society appear in the film's moments of conflict and happiness. It is certainly a film about unemployment, immigrant conditions, disaffected youth, and so on. But it has more to say about how men and women, broken by their living conditions, can be ready to fight for a moment of love or a dream.

This is the case with Slimane. Fired from his job in the small town of Sète, he immediately becomes a defender of the right to dream. Indeed, the project he dreamt about quickly becomes a temple for the pleasure of sharing, of being together. But with reality comes disillusion. When he asks for official planning permission because his restaurant-boat needs a place in the harbour, he encounters confusion among the bureaucrats. The fight to share space allows the film-maker to uncover the ambiguities and attitudes that create unease and make cohabitation between different communities so hard.

Apparent clichés are everywhere in this movie. Kechiche tells a story made up of stereotypes usually associated with the Maghrebian immigrant community: the workers living in overcrowded housing; the family meal of couscous; the special language and way of talking… Arabic words, typical North African emphasis and hybrid structures dropped naturally into the flow of sentences give the dialogue a degree of freshness and an authentic realism. Indeed, language in Couscous bears the stigmata of an identity crisis and the imprint of a culture caught between two worlds.

The atmosphere of tension and the feeling of suffocation come out of the image itself. For most of the time, characters are shown in close shots talking quickly, or eating and talking at the same time. In this logorrhoea, characters talk about nothing but also about everything. A conversation on diapers becomes the pretext for a discussion about the problems of the economy and the laws of marketing. Praise for grandmother's couscous turns into reflections about love and a philosophy of life. And all of this happens in front of a discreet and subtle camera that suggests the seriousness of the issues and gives the film its depth.

Hassouna Mansouri
© FIPRESCI 2008
Edited by Nick Roddick

top