Couscous

Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, starring Habib Boufares, Hafsia Herzi, Farida Benkhetache

Abdellatif Kechiche is the Tunisian-born director who cut a real dash in 2003 with his French high-school film L'Esquive, or Games of Love and Chance. His new movie is about a shipyard worker from an immigrant Arab community in the French Mediterranean port of Sete who is laid off, and uses his settlement cash to open a couscous restaurant.

In fact it is a deeply involving tragicomedy, combining warmth with an unexpected level of complexity, while delivering a fiercely unsentimental commentary on the sexual politics of family and food. Some critics have complained Kechiche's scenes of family life ramble on too long, yet for others they have the easygoing, directionless quality of real life; they radiate charm and authenticity. Without them, the drama would mean far less.

Slimane, played by Habib Boufares, is a 60-year-old man with a face incised by age, disappointment and overwork. Slimane faces a gradual reduction of hours at the shipyard, and plans to use his payoff to open a fish couscous restaurant on board a specially converted boat. Slowly but surely, he mobilizes a network of extended family and friends to help realize his dream.

Slimane achieves a remarkable level of success with his plan. But there is a fundamental faultline in the plan's foundations. For Slimane is divorced, living on his own in a waterfront hotel, and the extended family helping him, led by his ex-wife Souad (Bouraouia Marzouk), are not reconciled to the two women who are effectively Slimane's new family.

The restaurant adventure, like the institution of family itself, is thus built by women who must then smilingly let men take the credit. Women are behind Slimane's set-up, and it's women who save the day when things go wrong. And the reality behind the big family lunches is not simply a gorgeous, life-affirming joy in food and shared pleasure. Much of it is about the hard, submissive work of women, analogous to the strain they experience elsewhere in overlooking their menfolk's shortcomings and cruelties.

(China Daily 06/26/2008 page20)