Revenge is a dish best served with a swift kick to the groin in Kung Fu Zohra, an audacious attempt to smuggle the gritty issue of domestic violence into an upbeat action comedy peppered with affectionate homages to vintage martial arts films. Returning to the big screen after a long stretch working in TV, French writer-director Mabrouk El Mechri attempts a high-wire tonal balance here, with admirable chutzpah but decidedly wobbly results.
A creatively bold mismatch of style and subject is not necessarily a deal-breaker in the right hands, and El Mechri previously managed to find a fruitful satirical angle on action-movie tropes with his offbeat Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle JCVD (2008). But the uneven blend of social realist themes with escapist fun never quite gels here. Following its online world premiere at Rotterdam this week, where it won the VPRO Big Screen Award, Kung Fu Zohra arrives in French cinemas in March.
In the visually seductive opening sequence, splendidly named cinematographer Pierre-Yves Bastard soars and swoops across a golden desert landscape, alighting on a a roadside diner where roguishly charming French tourist Omar (Ramzy Bedia) first encounters Zohra (Sabrina Ouazani), a shy Tunisian beauty with a love of classic kung fu movies. Fast forward a year or so and the pair are now married, living in a high-rise apartment in a multicultural suburb of an unnamed French city. While Omar struggles to hold onto his construction job, Zohra works in a supermarket. Their relationship is starting to buckle under mounting tensions, chiefly Omar’s increasingly boorish, jealous, volatile temper.
When Omar’s toxic machismo boils over into physical violence, Zohra reacts with shock and shame, initially hiding the bruises behind outsized sunglasses and implausible excuses. But her bus driver friend and guardian angel Binta (Eye Haïdara), who also serves as the film’s chorus-like voice-over narrator, spots the signs immediately. She angrily commands Zohra to divorce Omar, and even calls the police after one extreme bout of fisticuffs. But the arrival of a baby daughter brings fresh complications and conflicted loyalties. As the years pass, and Omar proves to be both devoted dad and abusive husband, Zohra is torn between self-sacrifice and self-preservation.
Zohra’s solution, according to El Mechri, is learning to punch back harder. After some clandestine self-defence lessons gleaned from online videos, she takes a new job cleaning at a gym, where a wise old Chinese security guard (Tien Shue) becomes her martial arts mentor despite neither of them speaking each other’s language. Drawing on classic action films, from Enter The Dragon (1973) to Rocky (1976) to The Karate Kid (1984), this is the story’s most entertaining section, with its fast-paced training montages and gravity-defying stunts. Zohra’s reinvention as a kick-ass heroine who casually beats male enemies to a pulp is zany comic-book fun, but it also simplifies and trivialises all the emotional, psychological and cultural issues around domestic violence. By presenting physical abuse as a largely consequence-free slapstick showdown, Kung Fu Zohra abandons any deeper point it might have made.
Zippy, slick and handsomely shot, King Fu Zohra has plenty of breezy surface charm. Covering a wide emotional arc from downtrodden victim to superhuman feminist warrior, Ouazani is reliably magnetic on screen. It is also refreshing to see France’s suburban working-class immigrant districts depicted on film in warm, sunny tones rather than as dystopian concrete jungles. El Mechri assembles a strong team here, it is just a shame he gives them little to work with beyond one-dimensional characters stuck in two-dimensional lives, with no apparent hinterland beyond this single-issue plot. A post-credits flashback sequence in which Zohra single-handedly battles a gang of thugs is pure Loony Tunes fun, and perhaps a hint of the more unashamedly screwball action comedy that El Mechri secretly wanted to make.
Director, screenwriter: Mabrouk El Mechri
Cast: Sabrina Ouazani, Ramzy Bedia, Eye Haïdara, Tien Shue, Marie Cornillon, Mira Rogliano, Rémy Steelcox
Cinematography: Pierre-Yves Bastard
Editing: Marc Gurung
Production Design: André Fonsny
Producers: François Kraus, Denis Pineau-Valencienne
Production company: Les Films du Kiosque (France)
World sales: Gaumont
Venue: Rotterdam International Film Festival (Big Screen Competition)
In French
100 minutes
