Tropic Sprockets / Huda’s Salon

By Ian Brockway

“Huda’s Salon” by director Hany Abu-Assad applies some Hitchcockian touches to political unrest. The deceptively slow small talk leads to a horrifying event of manipulation, submission and blackmail.

The setting is Bethlehem in the Middle East. Women and men are observed but women are watched constantly. Every element is under surveillance. Not one second should be taken for granted. Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi) is a young woman married to a husband (Ali Suliman) who verbally abuses her. Reem, a mother, wants to escape for a mere two hours in having her hair done but she enters into a nightmare where the men (both Israeli and Palestinian) have guns and menace. 

No woman is safe.

Huda (Manal Awad) is set to be the scariest villain since Missy Armitage (Catherine Keener) in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” but just when you grow to hate her, the film shifts and Huda’s vulnerability comes to the fore.

The real evils here are politics and male chauvinism that transforms every woman into a chess piece or ceramic figure, solely for the purposes of sex and reproduction. The women around the table are vain vindictive spies for their male counterparts. Independent women have no leg to stand on. Reem is forced to become a scavenger with no one to talk to and no one to call. She is hemmed into an animal state unsure if she wants to live or die.

Dinner is a daily drudgery, open to ridicule from fellow Arabic women with no reward or praise. In one scene, the female relatives agree that Reem would be better off under the discipline of Isis, insinuating she would do well to concentrate on her looks. 

Huda herself was never treated fairly. She forcefully recruits female Palestinian informants in the hope that they turn on their abusive husbands. 

Suffice to say, if you are a woman in Bethlehem, nothing goes well.

The cinematography switches from the dark tones of an Old Masters painting to the claustrophobic moodiness of a Polanski film while the acting is first rate.

The terror of Reem is unbearably authentic as she is reduced to the condition of a terminal Eve, armed only with a kitchen knife and a red apple, as if to sacrifice herself for the country-wide sin of rampant masculinity, poisonous and going rogue.

There is little hint of the danger ahead under the affectionate talk of coffee and glamour but the homespun salon is as formidable as the stomach cavity of a great white shark and there is nothing as scary as the color pink or a door that is nonchalantly opened for business.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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