Don't Mess With The Zohan

The Age

Friday June 20, 2008

PHILIPPA HAWKER

Don't Mess With the Zohan

(113 mins) M

In Adam Sandler's new movie, you don't mess with the Zohan - the name of a legendary Israeli undercover operative - but you can take all sorts of liberties with dips. Hideous things are done with hummus, using every conceivable kind of implement - almost nothing has been left to the imagination.

Sticky substances are smeared all over this movie, and all over Zohan, a man of comically absurd physical powers, which he employs to fight his Palestinian arch-enemy Phantom (John Turturro). Zohan wants to cultivate a different set of skills: he dreams of being a hairdresser, and making the the world silky smooth. So he fakes his own death and flees to New York for a fresh start.

Rejected by his hairdressing idol, Zohan starts work in a salon where his upfront style - grotesquely out-of-date coiffure plus enthusiastic sexual servicing - is a huge hit with elderly female customers. But treachery is afoot, courtesy of the movie's main villain, a real estate developer.

Zohan is no Borat. There's something much much more amiable about the calculated grotesqueries of this movie's low, low comedy, as well as something light-headed about its why-can't-we-all-get-along solution to the problems of the Middle East.

-- PHILIPPA HAWKER

Hope

(104 min) M

Melbourne filmmaker Steve Thomas' documentary focuses on Amal Basry, an Iraqi woman whose first name means "hope", who was one of seven survivors of SIEV-X, the boat whose terrible fate, in 2001, became a symbol of what was revealed and concealed about refugee policy in Australia. Hope is what led Basry and her fellow passengers to take their dangerous journey, it becomes clear, but it it is a complicated emotion that resonates in different ways through the film. It examines the journey, its significance and, most of all, its aftermath, giving the SIEV-X, its passengers and their aspirations an identity and a meaning. It's a challenging work, in all kinds of ways.

Hope is a film about an important, troubling, still unexplored subject, and a strong, striking individual at its centre. Its signficance is not only related to the story it tells, but to how it is told, the manner in which the documentary subject is given space, and the way the filmmaker and subject have things to say to each other.

PHILIPPA HAWKER