By STEVEN ERLANGER
PARIS
ABDELLATIF KECHICHE has just turned 48, and the film he finished two years ago has finally come to the United States, to New York, which he calls “a city where one doesn’t feel like a stranger.”
Mr. Kechiche’s relationship to France, where he grew up from the age of 5, is more complicated, which gives his film, “The Secret of the Grain,” much of its power.
The extended family he depicts in the southern French port of Sète is founded on immigrants, but they are also French, and the mixture of cultures is shown with care, with long scenes of conversation that move with the bustle and sometimes the longueurs of cinéma vérité. The combination of cultures is not always benign, and the portrait of the second and third generations has some bite and regret, turning the film, at the end, from an expected sentimentality into tragedy. (It opened Wednesday in New York.)
Mr. Kechiche was born in Tunisia, and — while he denies it — the film shows few “normal white Frenchmen,” as the comedian Coluche used to joke, who have much generosity or compassion. Instead they seem to represent the petty provincial businessmen and politicians of Balzac.
“My desire wasn’t to make anyone detestable, but on the contrary, amiable,” he said over coffee in the Belleville district of Paris. “For me the family I describe is French — even if its origins are elsewhere, it is French.”
He did not want to do “a movie on some community,” he said. “It’s what’s universal in this family that interested me,” he added. “What I really wanted to describe was a social milieu and a family we can find in all the families of the world: all the secrets, the affections, the heart-wrenchings, the treachery are things we find in every family.”
Still, Mr. Kechiche is sometimes less sunny. In an interview last year with Le Monde he said he did not like to talk about his early life, “which was marked by the difficulties and racism suffered by a child of immigrants.” He added: “I fear falling into a dramatic story that would go against why I make movies. I have always lied about the subject, thinking that the only way to heal is to not remember.”
The title itself is a kind of compromise. There is no “secret of the grain” per se, but it’s a more evocative title than the one the British distributors gave the film, “Couscous.” “I think it’s O.K.,” Mr. Kechiche said carefully about the American title. “I can’t judge what will catch on with the public.”
The French title is “La Graine et le Mulet” (“The Grain and the Mullet”), a reference to the fish couscous that drives the plot. But it is the mullet of the original title that carries the strongest symbolism for Mr. Kechiche, who sees the abundant Mediterranean fish, a staple of the poor, as emblematic of the endurance of common people like his hero, Slimane.
“Mulet” in French also means mule, and some believe the fish — strong, adaptable, ornery, pigheaded — is named after the mule. The same wordplay works in Arabic too, in which the word burro, from the Spanish, finds its echo in “buri,” the word for mullet.
“It’s a fish with true character,” Mr. Kechiche said. “I’m convinced it’s called mulet because it’s hard to catch and has extraordinary energy. It’s the only fish that has the capacity to jump over the nets. It’s a very strong symbol for me. I consider that it’s almost a part of the popular classes, and at the same time it carries that capacity of revolt.”
Slimane, who is tall, gray-haired and dignified, is a man of few words, much like Mr. Kechiche’s father, to whom he dedicates the film. His father came to France and worked hard for his children; Slimane (Habib Boufares) does the same, in a shipyard in Sète. “My father could be like that,” said Mr. Kechiche (pronounced keh-SHEESH). “Especially after a day of work, there is a silence that settles in, due also to fatigue, to the weight that they carried.”
Slimane has complicated his life, with four grown children from his ex-wife and a new romantic relationship with the woman who owns a cheap hotel where he stays, who has a daughter, Rym, played by Hafsia Herzi. He tries to move between the two women and their children, and their children’s spouses — including the Russian wife of his irresponsible son Majid — doing his duty and dodging their rivalries and jealousies, which center on him. And yet they all care deeply about him in some powerful way, even when he is being obtuse.
He is both a beast of burden, a hard worker who is laid off, and a man of some nobility and patience who labors doggedly to use his severance pay and the sweat of his family to buy a ruined boat, repair it and turn it into a dockside restaurant for fish couscous.
The film turns on his efforts to succeed and on the opening-night party, which his entire rivalrous family strives to carry off. And when disaster seems to strike, it is his “new” family, and especially Rym, who contribute in an extraordinarily selfless way. But Mr. Kechiche has a sadder ending in mind.
The critical success of “The Secret of the Grain” — it won four Césars, the French counterpart to the Oscars — has made financing easier as Mr. Kechiche works on a new film, he said. That film, which he hopes to finish this summer, is based on the story of Saartje Bartman, the “Hottentot Venus,” an African woman who was taken from South Africa to Europe in 1810, at the age of 21, and displayed as a curiosity, her buttocks often bare, until 1815, when she died.
Her corpse was dissected, and her brain and genitals were preserved and displayed at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris late into the 20th century before her remains were returned to South Africa for burial in 2002.
“A film takes up a lot of time and space in a life,” Mr. Kechiche said. Finding a subject is not the problem, he said. “Desire is not difficult. It is satisfying it that is hard.”
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