Zanka Contact is a film deliberately built upon clichés. Its protagonists, Rajaes (Khansa Batma) and Larsen (Ahmed Hammoud) are a prostitute and a faded, drug-addicted guitarist who we’re meant to believe was in a metal band. They meet in a car crash in Casablanca and (once again, we’re meant to believe) fall in love with each other. Ismaël El Iraki directs at first with a kind of bland dramedy style and then with some odd, slightly jarring genre-bending as things draw to a close.
The main tension after they unite is avoiding Rajaes’s pimp, a despicable character who the film inexplicably manages to find sympathetic at the end. Stylistic features such as slow-motion impacts and head-banging music cues mean that her escape from sex work is handled without even a shred of sensitivity. All the misogynistic tropes about fallen women are present too – present and dully repeated.
Perhaps they set out with the notion of challenging these ideas, though it certainly doesn’t come across that way. Larsen too deals with his own traumas related to heroin use. A strange figure from his past keeps appearing in dream sequences, fracturing his psyche. The fact that each surreal moment uses the same strobe-like effect illustrates that the film-makers don’t quite have the vocabulary to challenge the regressive, base quality of the plot.
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Tonally, it just feels off. For the first half, we are guided through clubs and concert halls which exude a genericised love of hard rock music that is never fully formed. Teenagers in the audience wear Nirvana and Misfits shirts; the bands they see look more like Rainbow or Aerosmith. It’s culture as faux texture. It doesn’t really mean anything.
Of course, no one likes a film that flaunts its musical knowledge either, but this misguided sense of purpose applies to the rest too. The plot meanders and introduces false threads that aim for emotional urgency. Comedic notes fail to land, though succeed in undercutting the evil of the antagonists and the problems that they represent. Like many works that can’t stick to any of their ideas, it’s distinctly overlong.
As the plot goes on, Rajaes and Larsen begin to sing together, providing an alternative for both of them, a way out if you will. Some of these scenes are reminiscent of biopic tropes: she nervously walks up to the microphone; he stands behind her, waiting until she sings the way he knows she can. The threat of embarrassment is unimportant. He has the faith required to save her.
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These pretensions to being a soulful musical drama are interrupted quite violently by the pimp character, prompting Zanka to shift gears and become a hybrid road movie Spaghetti Western thing. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Italian Westerns, but they also tend to have a gloriously excessive sense of style. This does not. Or, perhaps it thinks it does. No-one quite pulls it off.
In terms of redeemable features, I found that Khansa Batma sold the hot-tempered, thrill-loving aspects of her character, though this is still limited by the misogyny of the role’s conception. I liked some of the gig scenes in the way that it’s sometimes fun to just see people at live shows. Some ideas such as using a sound-proofed studio to create tension were mildly inventive.
While technically efficient, and not quite bad enough to warrant any outrage, Zanka Contact really misses a uniqueness of technique to really elevate its obvious interest in pastiche and cultural movements such as hard rock. It tries to be wild but only in ways we’ve seen dozens of times before. Metal doesn’t hit you as it should. Chase scenes do not thrill. Jokes hardly ever merge these ideas into a coherent and enjoyable experience.
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