‘Huda’s Salon’: Hany Abu-Assad Offers a Fearless Reckoning on Women’s Oppression in Occupied Palestine [TIFF Review]

There’s no escape for the women in Hany Abu-Assad’s blistering new film “Huda’s Salon,” a fearless statement on gender oppression shaped as an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Back in top form, the acclaimed director behind stunners such as “Paradise Now” and “Omar” returns to dissecting the perilous Palestinian experience under Israeli control.

Before his camera enters the eponymous beautification business where lives are upended, Abu-Assad eases us into the reality of his people via snippets of quotidian interactions in the occupied territories. Onscreen text notes key events in the ongoing conflict’s timeline, including the construction of a separation wall in 2002. Laced with that information, the commonplace images assume the added meaning of immeasurable resilience.

Dishing out about her distrusting husband, Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi), a young mother of an infant daughter, relaxes in the salon chair. She is here for a revitalizing new hairstyle and some gossip. Meanwhile, Huda (Manal Awad), an older woman who owns the salon, goes on about Facebook and how acquaintances advertise their personal gripes on social media. Soon after Reem sips her coffee, this innocuous scene turns perverse when Reem loses consciousness and Huda takes comprising photos of her client.

Since a woman’s reputation — which must be without blemish — is her only currency in this patriarchal society, Huda’s tactics are effective in blackmailing her victims into becoming informers for the Israeli Secret Service. Should they betray her, they’d be seen as either adulterous or, if the full truth comes out, as traitors to the Palestinian cause.

Abu-Assad, a master storyteller avid in exposing the sociopolitical entanglements of his homeland in humanistic terms, uses this premise to unleash a gripping labyrinth of deceit and harsh truths where each of the characters’ motivations are challenged. Shocked, Reem heads home with her child and a number she must call if she comes by any intelligence useful to Israel. Through no fault of her own, she’s been thrust into doom.

Courageous in her restraint, Abd Elhadi’s fast-shifting performance takes Reem from sheer disorientation to marital anger knowing her husband’s loyalty is conditional; this ultimately morphs into all-out panic at the realization that there’s no way out of this trap. “I feel like I’m going to die soon,” she tells her spouse with prophetic certainty. Her position as a woman caught between a tyrannical power and her countrymen’s psychosis sets her up for disaster no matter what master she serves.

The film’s two credited cinematographers — Ehab Assal and Peter Flinckenberg — find an unassumingly dynamic mode of engagement with the story’s key indoor spaces, particularly in Reem’s home. As she walks from room to room, desperately hiding or plotting any plausible chance of surviving this ordeal, the camera accompanies her; our heart rates increase as the framing leaves room for us to interpret it as one would a horror film expecting a jump scare. With every passing complication, the tension mounts until we are so viscerally invested in her plight it becomes nearly unbearable.

But as Reem realizes that she is now a wanted fugitive, the Palestinian rebels, led by Hasan (Ali Suliman), apprehend Huda. Seated in the fighters’ hideout, the vilified businesswoman doesn’t back down and enters a psychological chess game with the burly man on the other side of the table. It’s a confrontation between a soon-to-be-dead collaborator and her executioner. Awad gives Huda unwavering dignity conveyed in her calmness and assertiveness when defying Hasan’s narrative painting her as a monstrous traitor.

These heart-to-hearts between Huda and Hasam can at times ring a tad too manicured — taking place as if with a theatrical tone — but are salvaged thanks to the two actors ability to bring the grand swings of emotion back down to a grounded level and the filmmaker’s shrewd decision to not use manipulative flashbacks. Abu-Assad also keeps Israel, and all that it entails out of the film from a visual standpoint. Their soldiers or agents are not physically part of this tale, making it an internal affair for Palestinians to reckon with themselves.

In Huda, Abu-Assad deposits a myriad of contradictions that further drive the tale into ambiguous and provocative territory. Yes, she drugged and abused the trust of multiple clients who are now unwillingly aiding the enemy, but the plan was imposed upon her. She assuredly pokes holes into her impromptu judge Hasan’s muscular exterior and challenges the concept of a foe from perspective. The enemy of women, as Huda notes, is any man granted the power to determine their agency. Under the traditional laws, a divorced woman like Huda becomes a social pariah, prime material to be exploited.

The director doesn’t engage in empty “both sides” arguments; there’s no discussion about how the insidious actions of the occupiers have pushed the Palestinian population into mistrust of one another. Unity against the oppressor becomes more valuable than life itself. But the film does allow him to confront how the onslaught of prohibitions on Palestinian women’s freedoms is a combination of those imposed by the adversary and their own.

Israeli authorities limit where anyone can go based on arbitrary restrictions — Reem’s brother-in-law is in prison and because of that she can’t leave town — and at home in Bethlehem or Gaza death is more desirable than shame. Women who stray from the parameters men dictate suffer irreparable consequences; Huda, for example, is no longer able to see her children. Though brought together through a malevolent ruse, Huda and Reem exist on the same marginalized wavelength at the mercy of a dangerous clash where they are pawns but not beneficiaries.

Strikingly bold in its dramatic construction, and adept at folding the macro issues into the lives of everyday residents of a tumultuous area of the world, “Huda’s Salon” is contained inside an expertly paced plot that seems ready to combust at any second. While we wait for an impending resolution to an ill-fated affair, Abu-Assad expounds a fierce moral qualm. [A]

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