Huda’s Salon (Abu-Assad, 2021)
My earliest encounter with political science was an elementary school riddle that asked, “What is the difference between a revolutionary war and a civil war?” The answer — “who wins” — is admittedly facile, but it contains a seed of truth that has grown with me through adulthood. Words are the first important way we distance ourselves and our practices from those we do not dare admit are anything like us.
I bring this up because Americans don’t think of ourselves as occupiers, colonizers, or the sort of people that have secret police. So perhaps it is possible to watch a film like Huda’s Salon and not feel as though it has any implications for the way we exercise power (if we wield it) or frame those, if any, who resist our doing so.
If that makes me sound pro-Palestinian, I guess I can live with that, though the movie’s thesis that totalitarian systems that dehumanize people force them to make survival decisions for which it is hard to hold them morally culpable isn’t exactly an anti-Zionist screed….at least it shouldn’t be to anyone who any kind of historical memory.
Truth be told, Israeli’s aren’t the enemies here. They remain an abstraction. What we get, what we are shown, are the effects of a system they set up and run. Totalitarian societies are not the root of all human evil, but the film aptly demonstrates how they elongate the ripples of individual acts of evil and make it easier for the worst of human behavior to endlessly replicate itself.
The film opens with Reem being drugged and sexually assaulted in the titular salon, part of a plan to compromise her and force her to become a political informant. Reem understands immediately and instinctively that she is living on borrowed time. An American movie would have Jason Bourne come by and extradite her. An Asghar Farhadi film (I saw one yesterday at the festival) would tack on another 100 minutes of her trying every possible tactic she could imagine to escape, only to arrive at the same conclusion.
That means there is a sort of nihilism permeating the film, which makes the last hour or so feel redundant. I kept waiting for the film to offer up some insight or message beyond “isn’t this horrific?” and “however bad a political situation is, women bear the worst of it.” I don’t think there is one.
Nevertheless, I do recommend the film, just because it resists dividing the world into neat piles of good and evil, suggesting instead that systemic evils harm us all and compromise us all.
