David Field, one of Aussie cinema’s relatively unsung bastions as an actor, makes his directing debut with a study of the intersection of suburban Lebanese immigrant life with both racial strife in high schools and gangland savagery. The film was banned for a short time from Sydney
Although it deals head-on with exactly the sort of racial strife between teen gangs that the fights involved, The Combination isn’t really worthy of controversy, being as it is a by-the-numbers melodrama, in which older brother John (George Basha), recently released from prison after an incident that’s never really explained, tries to keep younger brother Charlie (Firass Dirani) on the straight and narrow. Young and full of swagger, loving his regulation macho iconography (2Pac and Tony Montana), Charlie is drawn in first by a posse of fellow ethnic hotheads who delight in taking on the “Skips”, and then start working for a local drug dealer Zeus (Ali Haider) with a ruthless business technique. Meanwhile John, working as a cleaner at a local gym, hooks up with Sydney (Clare Bowen), a total shiksa, and embarks on a romance that faces the inevitable second-act blow-up.
The confluence of Field as director and star Basha’s screenplay confirm this as an actor’s project, evident in that it sports bearable dialogue and effectively etched characters. But the film is afflicted with touches that reek of script-development workshops, giving us a school shooting, an extremely rare and disturbing event in Australian society, which hardly seems to impact on the narrative apart from eliminating a couple of Charlie’s foils. Field utilises footage of the Cronulla ethnic riots as if it’s contemporaneous to the drama, and yet there’s no explication of a milieu of strife, thus blunting whatever point he wanted to make. And then it all turns into a gangster film. Zeus acts in a strangely stupid fashion for a successful crime lord, casually shooting Charlie despite having been paid what’s owed, in essence to lead us to a strong finale rather than through obeying narrative or criminal logic. John tracks him down and beats the shit out of Zeus, rather than put a bullet through him, leaving us with a dubiously upbeat end despite his having left alive a man who already shot one brother in the back for no good cause.
The Combination’s strengths are entwined with its weakness: a broad, Elia Kazan-style social-realist mix of sententious argument – most execrably in the scene in which Sydney is lectured by her white-bread parents on the problems of hanging about with Lebs, a scene that seems like real human conversation than a checklist of sociopolitical talking points – and straight genre fare. It’s faintly reminiscent of Once Were Warriors in its homey grit and the use of many authentic-feeling can’t-actors, but Field is no Lee Tamahori: the direction and the camera work in service of it are merely serviceable. Bowen is unimpressive. But Basha and Dirani are good, and Doris Younane as their mother Mary is a warm presence, and the film is watchable.
