‘A Gaza Weekend’: Toronto Review

Dir: Basil Khalil. UK/Palestine. 2022. 93 mins.

Is the world ready for a lighthearted farce set in the middle of a scary pandemic? Basil Khalil’s feature debut is an entertaining, endearingly old-fashioned comedy conceived long before Covid-19. Recent global events have rendered A Gaza Weekend strangely prescient: the frantic plot takes place as Israel is hit by a mutant virus and the Gaza Strip becomes the safest spot in the world. Khalil plays the situation for lowbrow laughs and political comment. The result is likeable without quite becoming the uproarious heart-warmer it seems to promise.

This is a film of escalating comic misadventures

An Oscar-nominee for his short Ave Maria (2015), Khalil has been developing A Gaza Weekend for over a decade. An opening title asserts that the film “started out as a conversation 11 years prior to Covid-19” before asking “Who was listening?” From there, Khalil swiftly establishes the story. A careless act at Israel’s Institute for Microbiological Research allows the rapid transmission of a virus. Spilt-screen images capture the headlines and hysteria that ensues. The fear of a sneeze or the reluctance to share a lift with a coughing stranger are all-too-familiar.

Mild-mannered Englishman Michael (Stephen Mangan) and his Israeli girlfriend Keren (Mouna Hawa) are reduced to taking desperate measures to escape. A cunning plan to flee Israel results in the couple being stranded in the Gaza Strip. They are given shelter by trader Waheed (Adam Bakri) and his family as they all figure out what to do next.

Khalil takes a cartoonish approach to the comic elements. There are times when this could be a hectic stage farce. A carousel of nosy neighbours and reluctant allies comes to the door of Waheed’s flat, leaving Michael and Keren scurrying to hide or reaching for a makeshift disguise. Khalil has a fondness for the scatological that manifests itself in an exploding cesspit, overflowing toilets and a running joke about Keren being struck by diarrhoea. The verbal humour is just as broad. The virus is given the initial ARS, leading to many gags about Palestine not being afraid of Israeli ARS.

The political points are suitably irreverent. Waheed and his wheeler-dealer partner Emad (Loai Noufi) are quick to exploit the pandemic panic, transforming sturdy bras into face masks they promote with the cheery claim that “not even Saddam can gas you with one of these”.

Inevitably, we witness a shifting of prejudices and the start of mutual understanding, especially as Keren adjusts to the deprivations of Gaza. There are culture-clash moments in the power cuts, lack of clean drinking water, and sense of imprisonment that seems to come as a revelation to her. An exasperated Waheed has one powerful moment when he declares, “Your nightmare has been our reality for a very long time”.

Khalil finds space for reflective moments interspersing scenes of street life as stoical Palestinians go about their business, chatting in cafes, buying in the market, growing strawberries in a tiny space or enduring another checkpoint. A Gaza Weekend might have benefitted from a little less irreverence and a little more investment in the relationship of a central couple who never seem an essential part of each other’s lives. Mostly, though, this is a film of escalating comic misadventures, complete with bumbling cops and a do-or-die chase to the border with Egypt.

The filmmaker keeps it all fast-paced and breezily engaging. There is a warmth and good humour to his characters that helps sustain interest in the conventional plot. The men here tend to be unreliable and ineffectual, whilst the women rise to the occasion and save the day. A well-cast ensemble has Mangan nicely underplaying the decent, trusting Englishman abroad, and Maria Zreik sparkles as Waheed’s wife Nuhad, a woman for whom a crisis becomes a rare opportunity to assert herself.