The story centers around Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares), the grave, 61-year-old father of a family of Arab immigrants who have made their home in the Mediterranean port city of Séte for the past four decades. During that time the family has grown and cracked, with Slimane’s two daughters and two sons growing up, getting married, and having children of their own while his own marriage to Souad (Bouraouia Marzouk), an intimidating matriarch and fantastic cook, has dissolved. Since then, Slimane has taken up with Latifa (Hatika Karaoui), an independent younger woman who owns the mousy hotel in which he rents a room. At the beginning of the film Slimane finds himself out of work at the shipyard where he has invested the past 35 years of his life, mostly because he is older and therefore slower and considered expendable despite his many years of service. With some prodding from Latifa’s feisty teenage daughter Rym (Hafsia Herzi, in an award-winning debut), Slimane decides to fulfill a lifelong dream of opening a restaurant, a difficult endeavor that requires contributions from his entire family, including Souad, whose fish couscous will be the signature house dish (the film’s original French title, which translates to The Seed and the Mullet, is a direct reference to this dish and the important role food plays in the film).

The key to Slimane’s dream, and the underlying poignancy of his endeavor, is that it is not for himself that he wishes to open this restaurant, but rather for his children, so that he may leave something for them. Laid off and fundamentally alone despite those around him, Slimane feels used up and impotent and lacking in any real accomplishments. In his mind, a man must leave behind some kind of legacy, and his separation from his family due to his and Souad’s divorce only serves to further isolate him, which is emphasized in a lengthy sequence in the middle of the film when the family gathers for a lively Sunday afternoon meal while he sits alone in his hotel room. Kechiche, who was born in Tunisia and raised in France and therefore knows this cultural terrain from personal experience, allows the characters to emerge out of the daily rituals of life that are, in essence, the film’s true subject. And, while keeping track of all the loose storylines is confusing at first, we soon begin to recognize the familiar, interwoven dilemmas of marital infidelity, the challenges of child-rearing, and the manner in which siblings relate to and compete with each other, all of which is complicated by Slimane’s relationship with Rym, who he treats as (and refers to as) his own daughter.

The story, which Kechiche unfolds with long sequences of handheld camerawork and intimate close-ups, gradually builds momentum as Slimane refurbishes a large boat for his restaurant and stages an invitation-only free dinner for a hundred friends, family, and potential investors; it is, in essence, him putting everything on the line with a singular event, which will either make or break him. We watch and wait, then, knowing that something at some point will go wrong, and when it eventually does, it begins a process of tragic unraveling that Kechiche uses for both conventional movie suspense and as an extended metaphor for the difficulties of the older immigrant generation. It is an absorbing, gut-twisting experience, even as it is leavened with the film’s close attention to character behavior and atmospheric detail. The film’s abrupt ending seems almost calculated to generate debate: Is it a cheat in which Kechiche escapes the web he’s spun without answering any questions, or a brilliantly designed ploy to force us to come to grips with not only the complexities of the lives we’ve been watching for the past two and a half hours, but also the simplistic notion embraced by too many movies that all problems have a conventional set of answers on which we can all agree? This is a film whose story extends far beyond the parameters of its running time.

Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick

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