In what seems to be the mode of the moment in serious French film, La Graine et le Mulet (in England, simply Couscous) inserts us into an extended family and forces us to figure out the relationships on the fly, the wrinkle here being that it’s a Tunisian immigrant family in a Mediterranean port city. Abdel Kechiche’s film is long and demanding, but immersive and engrossing. The patriarch of the family is dismissed from the shipyard job he has had for decades. Slimane (Habib Boufares in a nearly silent but speaking performance) has left his wife to live with another woman, who owns a small residential hotel, but he is in daily contact with his ex-wife and grown children (I’m still not sure how many altogether, but a half-dozen anyway, with spouses and kids), but his closest relationship is with Rym (the magnetically beautiful Hafsia Herzi), his mistress’s daughter. As a second-generation acculturated Frenchwoman, she helps him negotiate the bureaucracy as he seeks permits and financing for a scheme to turn an abandoned boat into a couscous restaurant featuring his ex-wife’s cooking. The story builds to a Big Night situation, long on suspense but light on food porn. You don’t know where it’s going, and when it ends, you’re not sure where it went, but it’s likely you will be drawn into this family, for better and for worse. (2008, Sund/T) *7+* (no MC, but MRQE here)
If Tunisian immigrants in southern France seem a little remote from your own experience, take a look at Tulpan (2009, dvd, MC-88), which might as well take place on a distant planet, in its portrait of a shepherding family on the desolate steppes of Kazakhstan. Sergey Dvortsevoy’s film will affect you either hypnotically or soporifically, more ethnographic documentary than standard film fare, though in effect a romantic comedy set among widely-dispersed yurts in a forbidding and unforgiving landscape. Tulpan (i.e. Tulip, in a place with hardly any vegetation at all) is the unseen heart’s desire of our hero, a young veteran of the Russian navy, living with his sister’s family and hoping for a bride and a flock of his own. I was watching this with someone else, who grabbed the remote and fast-forwarded through the second half, so I can neither support nor dispute this film’s highly-laudatory critical reception. I can, however, guarantee you it is different from any other viewing experience you’ve had, both majestic and empty, boring and amusing, understated and overpowering.
You’d be overpowered in a different way by District 9 (2009, dvd, MC-81), a sci-fi alien invasion flick with a novel premise, which bludgeons you with grisly humor before descending into the obligatory futuristic shoot-em-up. So in Neil Blomkamp’s film, the alien spaceship hovers over his native Johannesburg, and the aliens themselves are no superbeings but drones who have lost contract with their masters, and so become wards of the state, sequestered in the District 9 of the title, land too valuable for squatters, so a Halliburton-like company is brought in to move them forcibly to a more distant township, shades of apartheid. (Plot similarities to Avatar are probably part of the cultural moment.) The aliens are dismissively called “prawns” for their semi-crustacean and wholly-creepy appearance. The official responsible for their removal is nepotistically as out of his depth as many of the Bushies in the Baghdad Green Zone of 2004, but goes from comic butt to half-breed superhero as the movie careens to its conclusion. It’s certainly a dispensable film, but not without amusement.
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