After winning the Lion of the Future award at the Venice Film Festival in 2001 with his first film La faute à Voltaire and the Best Film César at home for his sophomore effort L’esquive (Games of Loves and Chance), Tunis-born French director Abdellatif Kechiche presented his third feature La Graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain) again in Venice to great acclaim. Though not all of the film’s 151 minutes feel indispensable, the story and mise-en-scene of this immigrant family’s daily struggles are so involving that it is still well worth seeing on the big screen. With this third film, Kechciche establishes himself clearly as one of the primary voices of immigrants in Europe, a French equivalent, at least in spirit, to Germany’s Fatih Akin.

Though La Graine et le mulet is still an exploration of both the universal search for happiness and the tensions and situations specific to immigrant families, Kechiche’s latest film takes a less down-and-dirty, shaky-camera-and-all approach in favour of something more novelistic. The writer-director has lost none of his appetite for long close-ups, overlapping dialogue and hysterical verbal fights, though generally speaking his approach to the material is more classical than his previous features, even indulging in the occasional reaction shot. With his film language toned down, Kechiche’s story of an extended immigrant and second-generation immigrant family on the Mediterranean coast locates the universal constants in the personal struggles, akin to the way Mann’s Buddenbrooks seemed to tell the story of all of the decaying German bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century through the interconnected stories of one family.

This stylistic choice is risky but mostly works, even if the rhythm is uneven at times and a few transitions are jarring (the current film was apparently cut down from a 180-minute version, which may explain some of the more awkward jumps). The two main events of La graine et le mulet are two large dinner scenes that take up over half of the film’s running time and allow for a studied contrast between a family dinner prepared for and by the family and a dinner prepared by the family but for the local (i.e. French) residents as part of Slimane’s restaurant dreams.

Typical of Kechiche’s storytelling style, the head of the family is not even present at the first dinner, as it is organised by and at the house of his ex-wife (Bouraouia Marzouk), with all his children, grandchildren and people married into the family. The girl with whom Slimane gets along best, however, is Rym (Hafsia Herzi, a true discovery), who is not one of his own daughters but the child of Slimane’s lover Latifa (Hatika Karaoui), in whose small family-run hotel he lodges.

Rym will be instrumental in getting Slimane to realise his dream of opening a couscous restaurant and in overcoming some of the problems associated with the second dinner, which is held for the inhabitants and local notables of the town. His appreciation of her seems genuine and can also be read on a symbolical level, as she is the link between the traditional family nucleus which Slimane has left behind but to which he is still tied (the couscous in the restaurant is a specialty of his ex wife) and his new, less attached life found in France and the restaurant business, which seems  to indicate it might be a happier life but not necessarily an easier one.