The opening scene of Huda’s Salon covers a lot of ground in one continuous shot without leaving the confines of the titular place of business. In those few minutes, the friendly chatter between proprietor Huda (Manal Awad) and customer Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi) shifts from neighborhood gossip to something much more sinister as both women are revealed to be trapped within intractable systems that treat them as disposable pawns. For one, it’s a marriage that has curdled into jealousy and suspicion, and for the other it’s spying and recruiting for Israeli intelligence. Their mutual dilemmas throw them into sudden and fierce opposition. It’s the West Bank in present day, and there doesn’t seem to be any escape for either woman.
With his previous features Omar and Paradise Now, writer/director Hany Abu-Assad has established his credibility as a craftsman of tightly wound thrillers that tangle with the psychology of people caught in situations they can’t escape. Huda’s Salon treads that same ground, in the shadow of the Israeli occupation where various layers of oppression weigh on the characters. Political, social and cultural realities circumscribe this milieu like the looming wall that bisects the West Bank setting. First within the salon and then on the teeming streets, Abu-Assad’s camera captures the texture of this world in vivid detail. Knickknacks on counters, metal doors, a clunky space heater, a kitchen knife—it all adds up to a lived-in vibe that situates the action in a world that feels visceral even if it’s beyond the experience of some viewers.
But what really grounds the story is the treatment of the two principal characters whose fates are set in motion with that opening scene. Both are victims of different kinds of blackmail. Huda, initially the villain, finds herself in the hands of Palestinian resistance fighters who know she’s been entrapping local women to spy for the occupiers, not out of choice or ideology, but because she herself has been compromised. She chooses her marks carefully, picking young, attractive women whose husbands are assholes, both because it makes them more vulnerable but also because she empathizes with them. She may even be rationalizing that she’s helping to extricate them from one bad situation in exchange for another. Her affect is one of nothing-left-to-lose cool. She knows she has no way out, and so she confronts her captors with dignity and candor that looks to them like defiance. The scenes where she faces off with the leader of the resistance cell, Hasan (Ali Suliman), are verbal chess matches of bluff and challenge where, despite her captivity, she manages to dominate him for a time. She’s a study in dignity and grace under pressure.
Reem finds herself in a different kind of frying pan. Her husband, Yousef (Jalal Masarwa), is convinced that she’s seeing another man, and the threat that Huda is holding over her registers as guilt. While she’s not captive, her distress keeps her confined to their small house where his visiting family subjects her to jovial bullying that steadily erodes her composure. Elhadi’s remarkable performance is contained, but just barely, as Reem begins to crack under the pressure of the untenable situation she’s in. A phone call could potentially save her, but would also lead swiftly to the loss of everything she has. That kitchen knife and that space heater begin to look like alternate ways out.
Abu-Assad depicts all of this with an immediacy that verges on claustrophobic, particularly as Reem stalks around her tidy home searching for escape or succor. In other scenes, long shots are composed as if this were a stage play where the actors project their drama from spotlit pools surrounded by darkness. The political backdrop represents many generations of injustice and struggle, but very little of that is made explicit. There’s no mention of who the occupiers are, or what the resistance is fighting against. All of that is understood as a background hum to the struggles of these characters who, despite all being on the same side, find themselves destroying one other to gain the tiniest advantage. In Huda’s salon, the haircuts come at a steep price.
Photo courtesy of IFC Films
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