Huda’s Salon was meant to be Hany Abu-Assad’s welcome back to Palestine, a chance for the celebrated director to return his focus to his homeland between big-budgeted U.S. productions. The story was homegrown, the cast chosen from Palestine’s best, and the theme of moral compromise recalled his finest, earlier works. Sadly, much of these expectations fall flat, victim to an uneven script and weak editing that never finds the right rhythm. It’s the kind of film that makes you think: had the protagonist shown even an ounce of intelligence, these ninety minutes would have passed in a very different manner. Premiering in Toronto’s Platform section and making its MENA region debut at the Red Sea Film Festival, Huda’s Salon is a disappointing work likely to coast along international distribution circuits thanks to the director’s past achievements.
It’s long past time filmmakers second-guess adding the “based on true events” line in the opening credits, as it too often feels like a way of shielding the script from criticism, and who’s to say what percentage of fact constitutes “based on”? Does it even matter? No doubt much of Huda’s Salon is grounded in reality, with its story of a hairdresser working for the Israeli secret service by supplying them with informants she’s blackmailing, but the film struggles to provide enough psychological insight to make audiences feel invested in these lives, with the result that whether completely invented or a careful simulacrum of real events, we always feel there’s something missing.
Without her baby Lina, Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi) wouldn’t be able to stand the dissatisfaction of married life: her husband Yousef (Jalal Masarwa) is jealous of every man she looks at, and his lack of trust made her fall out of love with him soon after the knot was tied. She admits all this to her hairdresser Huda (Manal Awad), who seems sympathetic enough until Reem is slipped a mickey and wakes up to discover that Huda’s had compromising nude photos of her taken with a man (Samer Bisharat) while she was knocked out. In exchange for suppressing the pics, Reem is to act as an occasional informant for the Israeli Secret Service. The blackmail sends her into a panic – “I feel like I’m going to die very soon” she melodramatically tells Yousef, who doesn’t understand what she’s going on about.
Huda’s shenanigans haven’t gone unnoticed by Palestinian freedom fighters, who kidnap the hairdresser and bring her into a cellar for interrogation by Hasan (Ali Suliman). Her calculated cool-as-a-cucumber vibe clashes with his low rumbling intensity, with each scoring points off the other as Huda tries to stave off torture and win some sympathy while Hasan attempts to get her to reveal the names of her collaborators. Meanwhile above ground, Reem is running around in terror as she realizes the men fighting for a cause she believes in are now on her trail – she’s convinced they view her as a traitor to the Palestinian state, though given that only one day has passed since she was compromised, it’s hard to understand why she doesn’t just let her pursuers know exactly what happened.
During the interrogation, unsatisfyingly intercut with Reem’s anxiety-filled dashes around Bethlehem, Huda insinuates herself under Hasan’s skin, getting him to confess to his own guilty conscience stemming from a betrayal committed in childhood. The admission is designed to call into question any posturing of moral superiority, a grey area the director-writer has always excelled in revealing, yet Abu-Assad’s dissatisfying script merely teases us with undelivered promises of psychological acuity. Huda’s motivations for joining forces with the Israeli occupiers are too vague to withstand scrutiny, and the dialogue shovels information as if designed to distract us from the weakness of the characters, in particular Reem’s.
Neither Abd Elhadi nor Suliman, two of the finest actors around, are given any favors: she’s merely jumpy and he’s reduced to shifting between harshness and incertitude, both exemplified by brooding. Only Awad gets something meatier to play with, balancing an imperturbable façade with a tumultuous interior, yet even her trajectory becomes predictable and falls short of what could have been drawn out of this ambivalent figure, especially given the enormous gravity of her acts.
A not inconsiderable part of the problem is the attempt to build up anticipatory tension through intercutting scenes of Huda’s interrogation with Reem’s mental flailing as she tries to figure out how to extricate herself from an impossible situation. The cellar’s surrounding darkness sets off the spotlighted concentration of the two bull-headed antagonists, yet their psychological games are enfeebled by jumps to the far less interesting action on the streets and in Reem’s home, where the net closing around the frazzled woman never feels especially urgent, especially when an ounce of intelligence on her part could end her difficulties quite quickly. The print sent to the Red Sea Festival had the compromising photos blurred out, which felt less like self-censorship and more like a reasoned decision to avoid any kind of titillation through images meant as violations of trust and respectability.
Director: Hany Abu-Assad
Screenplay: Hany Abu-Assad
Cast: Ali Suliman, Maisa Abd Elhadi, Manal Awad, Jalal Masarwa, Omar Abu Amer, Samer Bisharat, Najah Abu Elheija, Kamel Al Basha, Angham Khalil, Nelly Salman, Munther Bannoura, Samah Mahmoud, Tamara Abu Laban, Ziad Jarjoura.
Producer: Amira Diab, Mohamed Hefzy
Co-producers: Shahinaz Elakkad, Mohamed Elakkad, Alaa Karkouti, Maher Diab, Hanneke Niens, Hans De Wolf, Sawsan Asfari
Executive producers: Emilie Georges, Mathieu Delaunay, Ossama Bawardi
Cinematography: Ehab Assal, Peter Flinckenberg
Production design: Nael Kanj
Costume design: Hamada Atallah
Editing: Eyas Salman
Music: Jeffrey Van Rossum
Sound: Raja Dubayah, Ibrahim Zaher, Mark Glynne, Tom Bijnen
Production companies: H&A Productions (Palestine), Film Clinic (Egypt), MAD Solutions (Egypt), Lagoonie Film Production (Egypt), KeyFilm (The Netherlands), Cocoon Films (UK), Philistine Films (Palestine), in association with the Doha Film Institute (Qatar).
World sales: Memento Films International
Venue: Red Sea International Film Festival (Competition)
In Arabic
88 Minutes
