'Secret of the Grain': There's a Lot to Chew On

There's oodles of couscous in "The Secret of the Grain," but this is no happy food movie. The couscous doesn't nourish its characters like the stir-fried clams in "Eat Drink Man Woman" or the Italian timpano in "Big Night."

"Secret" is an organic, dyspeptic 2 1/2 -hour buffet of feeble fathers, failing sons and tiny cultural calamities. There's plenty of grub but everyone's starved at the end -- literally, emotionally, patriotically, you name it.

The family in crisis is a covey of Tunisian immigrants settled in a French port city on the Mediterranean. The father, a sullen dockworker named Slimane, is saddled with a low-paying job, an ex-wife and petulant children who demand alimony he can't provide, and a girlfriend and her teenage daughter, Rym, whose love he doesn't deserve and is unable to reciprocate. "I've done nothing, left nothing," he says at one point, stunned that immigration has led to failure instead of success.

Every sad sack gambles for redemption, though, and Slimane chooses a risky route: He will open a couscous restaurant on a dilapidated boat using a bank loan and his ex-wife's cooking prowess. The rest of the town snickers, but Slimane, with quiet resolve, gets closer and closer to realizing his goal. His one true supporter is the spirited Rym, played by the charismatic Hafsia Herzi as the only family member grounded in reality instead of self-pity or selfishness.

Although shot in hand-held close-ups, "Secret" is mostly ambiance, at once intimate and austere, documentary-like but subtler and messier in design, as if spun from found footage. It's Altman-sur-Mer, but without payoff or panache. Scenes go on and on. Dialogue loops in circles. We are stuck listening to Slimane's daughter-in-law wail about her philandering husband. We are stuck watching Slimane wither under the scathing appraisal of a loan officer. We are stuck at the brunch table, the aroma of resentment in the air. The couscous is there, too, but who cares.

With his dispassionate camera, Tunisian-born director Abdel Kechiche grazes an array of indignities -- the racism lobbed between the French and the Arabs, the dream-killing drudgery of bureaucracy, the spite of children, the psychic impotence begotten by a poor economy -- without turning "The Secret of the Grain" into a message movie or a civics lesson. Or consistent entertainment, for that matter.

What is it instead? A ponderous tragedy about put-upon manhood? A verite snoop into cultures that are sexually mingled but publicly uneasy? A pill to be swallowed in the name of serious filmgoing? Maybe all of these.

There's no hook, no heft, no memorable scenes, but there is an arresting suspense that begins to swell during the final 20 minutes, when Slimane's gamble teeters between success and failure. Quietly arranged tensions build to a simmer. The movie's final act of restraint (or subversion?) is cutting to black before the boil.

The Secret of the Grain (151 minutes, at Landmark's E Street Cinema) is unrated but contains profanity and a mild sexual situation. In French, Arabic and Russian with English subtitles.