The Combination

The Combination

By Jonathan Fisher, March 5th, 2009


I have a suspicion that The Combination is extremely realistic, and that is one of the best and saddest aspects of the film. It is a movie that delves so deeply and truthfully into race relations in this country that some may find it difficult to watch -- in fact, it's been well-publicised that the Greater Union cinema change in Sydney pulled the film because it caused fights between Lebanese-Australians and Caucasians during screenings. That's too bad, because is not an incendiary film. For a film about race and the violence that race creates, I found it unusually sensitive and contemplative. I can completely see The Combination becoming as influential a snapshot of race relations in Australia as Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing was in America in the late 1980s. But please don't let the fact that The Combination is a 'racism movie' deter you from seeing it. This is a film that delves deep into its characters, and halts becoming 'just another movie' about race, entering the realms of powerful drama.

The Combination begins as John (George Basha), a Lebanese-Australian, is released from jail. He returns to the family home in the Sydney suburbs, where he discovers his younger brother Charlie (Firass Dirani) is not only making the same mistakes that he did before he landed himself in jail (echoes of American History X), but is creating a whole set of new ones. For Charlie, the stakes are higher and far more dangerous. He has cemented himself a position in a group of angry, violent students who all have one thing in common -- they share a racial diversity that makes them pariahs among the white students of the school. His closest friend, Zeus (Ali Haidar), is heavily into drugs and weapons. His influence on Charlie is such that he convinces him to get in deep with a vicious drug dealer named Ibo (Michael Denkha), and enlists him as a partner in thuggery in his vendetta against a fellow student who is white.

John meets and begins a relationship with a white girl named Sydney (Clare Bowen), but it is clear that things are going to be tricky. She has parents who preface everything they say about John and the Lebanese community with "Now, I'm not being racist, but..." Sydney's father even has his reasons for disliking Lebanese-Australians -- but then, all racists 'have their reasons'.

First-time director David Field manages a phenomenal balancing act in portraying the Lebanese-Australian community as alienated from the rest of the suburban Sydney community without casting aspersions against them. They are distinguished by things that cultures are really distinguished by -- their food, their familial values (Doris Youane is superb as the matriarch of John and Charlie's family), the perpetual struggle they face in attempting to fit into a society that, often in spite of their best efforts, makes them feel like guests. At one point of the film, John tells Sydney that in Lebanon he is referred to as an Australian, while in Australia he is sneered at for being a 'Lebo'.

All of the performances are first-rate, particularly George Basha as John, Firass Dirani as Charlie and Ali Haidar as Zeus. In a bizarre and sad case of life imitating art, Haidar was arrested and jailed not long ago in Sydney for assault. Additionally, last month there was a stabbing murder in the same club that a scene from the film was shot. Our challenges with race relations in this country are far from over, four years on from the Cronulla riots, an event that book-ends The Combination.

As in Spike Lee's 1989 masterpiece Do The Right Thing, no character in The Combination is truly innocent. The white student doesn't do the right thing when he snarks and provokes his Lebanese schoolmates by calling them 'wogs' and 'towelheads'. Charlie, Zeus and co. don't do the right thing when they physically assault the student in retaliation. John has certainly not done the right thing in the past, and he doesn't do the right thing at the end of the film when he... I'll let you find out for yourself. The Combination regularly reached a level of power that surprised me, and it explores such delicate subject matter without ever resorting to didactism or self-righteousness. It knows that no film, or one person, can provide the answers to the questions that it poses. I think it's that objective but sensitive perspective that makes The Combination so effective, and so heartbreaking.