Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Maisa Abd Elhadi, Ali Suliman, Manal Awad, Jalai Marsala
Intro:
... multidimensional, and both elemental and complex.
The setting here is Bethlehem in 2002, just after the building of a ‘separation wall’ dividing the local Palestinians from the Israelis. For a film with such an inherently politically-charged context, made by people with a presumed passionate viewpoint, it avoids the obvious and is impressively subtle and unpreachy – yet simultaneously powerful, stark and cumulatively grim.
The story begins mildly enough, with a ten-minute take consisting of a relatively inconsequential conversation between the titular Huda (Manal Awad), a hairdresser, and her customer Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi), who is unhappily married and whose husband is chronically jealous.
And then – well, to say much about what happens next would really be telling. Suffice to say that Reema is compromised into working for the Israeli secret service, of whom we see little or nothing. Huda for her part soon finds herself in an even more hapless and extremely dangerous situation, which is what can easily happen in a place where – as one character puts it – “everyone is an enemy … It’s easy to occupy a society which is already repressing itself.”
Huda’s Salon is multidimensional, and both elemental and complex. It alternates effectively between Reem and Huda, who is being interrogated by a man called Hasan (Ali Suliman). The dialogue is sharp, the atmosphere is often claustrophobic, and the style is often like a play – in a good way. To say that none of the contending factions is whitewashed would be a major understatement.
See it if you can.
