HUDA’S SALON is from 2021 and it’s the most recent film from Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad – I previously reviewed his films RANA’S WEDDING (2002), THE COURIER (2012), OMAR (2013) and THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US (2017). After that last one, a big English language movie starring Idris Elba and Kate Winslet, he returned home for another one of his thriller/dramas about life in occupied Palestine.

It opens in the titular Bethlehem hair salon, where new mother Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi, Baghdad Central) is having her hair done by Huda (Manal Awad). I kinda fell for the implication that it would be a conversational, day-in-the-life kind of movie, because there’s an 8-minute-long oner as Huda washes and brushes Reem’s hair and they talk about people these days styling their own hair based on Youtube videos, then about the invasiveness of Facebook, and then how possessive Reem’s husband is but how maybe she’ll open her own salon some day when her daughter’s older. And the shot is still going as Huda pours her a cup of coffee (that’s nice) and puts some drops of something in it (oh, that’s not nice) and gets ready to cut her hair but she passes out and Huda closes the curtains and opens a door into a back room where a dude named Said (Samer Bisharat, OMAR) has been sitting on a bed looking at his phone while he waits. Now he helps carry Reem in, takes her clothes off and poses naked for Polaroids with her.

There’s finally a cut and then another pretty long oner where Reem wakes up naked in the bed, Huda shows her one of the photos and explains that she’s being blackmailed and has to become a snitch for the occupation. If she tells anyone then “the Secret Service will be ruthless, and your daughter will pay the price.” Huda very plainly says “We’re all in the same boat” and to call some guy named Musa with information. At the end she says “Let me finish your hair before you leave,” which is real rich. Reem just walks out, disgusted.

The Facebook discussion is ironic because it turns out she’s also under surveillance in the old fashioned way. And not just by the occupation – Huda and her salon are being staked out by the resistance. They capture her and she spends most of the movie in a dank basement being interrogated by Hasan (Ali Suliman, CHRONICLE OF A DISAPPEARANCE, PARADISE NOW, THE KINGDOM, BODY OF LIES, LONE SURVIVOR, ARTHUR THE KING) about who the people in her stack of blackmail photos are.

For all of Huda’s treachery she does have some guilt, first pleading for the innocence of the women in the photos and then specifically trying to hide Reem’s, knowing that she hasn’t even had time to snitch. But the attempt only focuses their attention on Reem.

When Reem hears about Huda being taken in she only has a few options, none of them good. She tries calling Huda, whose captors answer the phone. She tries calling the Musa guy to beg for a border pass, but he won’t do it without her trading him some information.

Reem clearly hates the occupation, but she’s not trying to be involved in some war, she’s just trying to live her life, and she’s stuck between two ruthless factions – the heavily armed one that oppresses her and the smaller one that will assume she betrayed them. Not only that but she fears telling her husband Yousef what’s going on because he’s always paranoid about her cheating or not loving him. The first thing is not true but the second one might be. She can’t fake happiness under these circumstances, and everyone from her husband to her mom to her doctor assume it’s something to do with her marriage.

Yousef is an interesting character because he pretty much sucks, he’s got a bunch of shitty attitudes and doesn’t get Reem at all, but he’s not a monster. He does worry about her and try to understand what’s up with her. He seems like a pretty realistic character.

The filmmaking is mostly pretty straight forward, it never seems like he’s showing off, even when there’s another oner that’s really impressive and terrifying. It involves a circle of men questioning Said and then they light him on fire and he runs around and crashes into a wall. I can tell where the cut is hidden but man is it smooth, and the fire stunt is great, it’s not one of those ones where he’s wearing a big chunky suit to protect him. Or maybe it’s a visual effect? If so it fooled me.

Some of the dialogue between Huda and Hasan is contrived to compare and contrast their viewpoints and backgrounds, have them challenge each other’s perspectives, it’s very much like a play. I like that stuff less than I like Reem’s thriller story, but it’s pretty well done, and it elaborates on Abu-Assad’s theme that, as Huda says, “It’s easier to occupy a society that already represses itself.” She herself was forced into working for the occupation via blackmail and fear that her husband would kill her.

I’m still enjoying watching Abu-Assad’s movies, especially the Palestinian ones. There’s something about seeing an artist’s expression of life in occupied territories that’s more enlightening than even seeing a documentary about it. Or at least differently enlightening. This paints a very upsetting portrait of a situation that has obviously turned much more horrifying in the years since, and more tense even for those not living in the war zone.

Last year Maisa Abd Elhadi, who played Reem, was arrested twice, put on house arrest and detained for two days for Instagram posts about the October 7th attacks in Israel. According to descriptions in Israeli newspapers one post “mocked the victims,” which sounds bad, but another “rejoiced at the sight of the Gaza-Israel border fence being brought down” and compared it to the fall of the Berlin wall. For that she was charged with “incitement to terrorism and expressing solidarity with a terror organization,” and an interior minister wanted her citizenship to be revoked. I couldn’t find what happened to her after that, but she seems to have removed the illegal sentiments from Instagram, has no more recent posts, and all the comments on the old ones are Israeli flag emojis and people telling her to get raped, etc.

The sorts of things the good guys do, right?

Something I learned from reading up on the arrest is that Abd Elhadi is apparently in WORLD WAR Z, though it’s not listed on her IMDb page. Palestine and its cinema seem so far away, but there they are, connected to us through a so-so Brad Pitt movie. They’re human beings, fer fuck’s sake. I wish I knew how to replace our governments with people willing to recognize that, and not willing to fund and support oppression, starvation, and mass slaughter. Until then the horrors will keep snowballing, more and more depraved murders and tortures, month after month, the cruelty becoming more flagrant every day, the excuses never changing, because there just isn’t any possible context to justify this kind of thing. So why bother trying to make it convincing? I’m trying to be positive and get the point across just by writing about the movies, but I feel like an asshole not coming out and underlining it, and I don’t know how to do that with any kind of subtlety.

Sorry. Luckily, Abu-Assad is adept at exploring the realities of occupation through interesting characters and suspenseful scenarios. Don’t mind me, watch HUDA’S SALON.