No Ordinary Fool

It is important to say, right from the very outset, that this film is not overly concerned with plot. Why so? Well, it is essentially a 150-minute story about a laid-off shipyard worker opening a floating restaurant against the odds, with unsurprising first-night mishaps thanks to his somewhat dysfunctional family. Yes, it does sound a tad familiar, does it not? However, I bring it up at the start of the review in order to put it to one side thereafter. For, you see, this film looks to achieve a great deal more than this somewhat hackneyed plot.

Instead, what the audience is treated to is a slow-burning film about a large North African family living in an unspecified French port city. The head of the family, Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares), is made redundant at the start of the film. 61-years old, he is separated from his wife and mother of their six children and now lives with the owner of a small hotel and her daughter Rym (Hafsia Herzi), who loves him as a daughter would. He is unquestionably a family man and rather than take the easy option, at the end of a hard life, of going back to North Africa and using his severance pay to start a small business, he attempts a much bolder project that may provide for his family in years to come.

The film is mostly advanced by way of a lengthy series of vignettes, dominated by two large dining scenes. The earlier one centres on a Sunday family lunch, where the six siblings, their partners, and their children crowd around their mother’s small dining table, enjoying the traditional meal of fish couscous. The dialogue is quite realistic from moaning about the cost of nappies to squabbling over family issues. However, uit is achieved in a free-flowing and humorous manner, with many frames shot so close-up that not even the entire of the actor’s head is visible.

No conversation in the film is concluded in a few words if many more can suffice instead. What is more, the least development is drawn out into a semi-epic episode. Yet, as anyone who has spent time in France will know, this is typically the way of life there and, quite franky, these scenes could only ever have been achieved by giving the actors free reign to develop each of them in a natural and unscripted manner – be it the scene involving the old men outside the bar, the ones with the mother and daughters in the kitchen, or the murmured conversations later on of the somewhat loathsome diners in the restaurant.

There are some really memorable moments in all of this – be it a quiet moment spent by Rym with an old immigrant, as he explains what people of his generation now live for, to the one where there is a painfully raw, brutally intense, and utterly unrestrained outpouring of emotion from Slimane’s daugher-in-law (Alice Houri), to the one where Rym piles a remarkable guilt trip upon her mother at what she perceives as being the latter’s stubborness.

What shines through in all of this is the emphasis on family and friendship. They may scream and shout at each other and they may live completely in each other’s pockets, but there equally seems to be an unbreakable bond here, as everyone rallies around everyone else. Indeed, anyone who questions this behaviour at all is shamed into utter silence.

On the whole, I liked this film. Its length gives it something of a flabby feel and you do start to twitch a little too much near the end because of the unnecessarily drawn-out denouement. However, there is some remarkable acting to be enjoyed from the impenetrable stoicism of Boufares to the shining brilliance of Herzi. Indeed, the latter is surely destined for some major roles on the back of this compelling performance. Moreover, this is definitely one of the best slices of ordinary life in France that I have ever seen portrayed on film. I am hungry already for what director Abdel Kechiche comes up with next.