The most martial of the arts – Newspaper Kommersant No. 151 (7352) of 08/19/2022
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Mabrouk El Mekri’s Kung-Fu Divorce (Kung-Fu Zohra), a multicultural-social martial arts comedy, was released. Mikhail Trofimenkov I am sure that the film is destined to become a hit for its target audience – Arab women of a difficult fate living in the Parisian suburbs.
In Hollywood in the 1940s, the literary agent was famous for being able to fit the content of any text into one phrase, accessible to the producer’s mind. Once, on a bet, he reduced the content of Ernest Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” to the formula: “The guy was ordered to blow up the bridge, and he blew it up.” To summarize the meaning of “Kung Fu Divorce” is much simpler: “Zohra wanted to thrash Omar for a long time, and she thrashed him.”
Zohra (Sabrina Ouazani) and Omar (Ramzi Bedia), the victims of a hasty but, apparently, completely voluntary marriage, moved from their native Tunisia to the Parisian suburbs. Typically, such neighborhoods are known as “problematic”, but in this particular area everything is poor, but clean. No syringes for you in the entrances, an absurd and harmless herd of teenagers is responsible for crime.
The religious factor, the headache of the immigrant suburbs, is absent altogether. Omar, if he believes that the female universe comes down to the kitchen and the “kinders” – the adored and pampered daughter Zina, then he does not remember the “kirkh”, that is, the mosque. Yes, and a bottle of vodka is capable of planting a screw from the throat cleaner than any infidel in a moment of emotional discord. Well, the shopping center where Zohra works as a cashier – a true temple of consumption – plunges her into awe. For the protection of the property of network monopolies – as is clear from the fervent battle going on in the final credits – she is ready to lay down her stomach. Moreover, she is the only breadwinner in the family, since Omar was fired from the construction site.
In short, no social issues, except for gender. Omar – and this is connected not so much with the patriarchal traditions of the Maghreb, but with the mores of any conditional urban outskirts – at some point begins to dissolve his hands. Zohra suffers in silence, explaining her habit of wearing dark glasses either by conjunctivitis or retinal detachment. Emancipated Malian Binta (excellent Ei Aydara), a bus driver and a kind of good spirit of the suburbs, smirks skeptically – they say, we know the name and surname of this “conjunctivitis” – and advises using the services of her cousins, who are quick to reprisal. But Zohra wants to do everything herself, for which she gets a part-time job as a cleaner in the gym, where she can swing for free at odd hours. A divorce from Omar is fraught with the loss of the opportunity to communicate with Zina.
As it should be in a fairy tale, an old boletus enters the stage – a fragile Chinese wizard Chong Siu (Tian Shu), who replaced the gym guard hospitalized with a nervous breakdown and almost never utters a word in French. That, in fact, is all. Much of the film consists of a couple’s alternating showdown and pair training of Chong and Zohra, who, according to the master of martial arts, must prepare for battle in her familiar kitchen space. Strategically, Chong calculated everything correctly. It’s just that the kitchenettes, that the living rooms in the HLM standard houses, as the local “khrushchev” are called in France, are so small that any hand-to-hand combat in them will inevitably lead to the complete destruction of the habitat. I don’t care, the main thing is that the husband will become like silk after a thrashing.
Is it funny? Sometimes yes, a little. It’s funny, for example, when Zohra practices a finger strike on the croup, which he crushes for couscous. Has it been filmed? Yes, a little, in some places: in fact, two battle scenes fall at the very end of the film, to which the viewer still has to live. Is it relevant, how does it relate to reality? If it matches, then France has solved all suburban problems, except for special cases of domestic violence. Is it touching? Decidedly not, the lisping around Zina looks fake. And the only moral to be extracted from the film is the old maxim “Good must be done with fists.”
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