Movie Review: 'Huda's Salon'

Huda’s Salon begins on the most mundane note. Two women in a hair salon are having a conversation typical of the setting. Huda (Manal Awad) is a kindly hairdresser having a friendly working friendship with Reema (Maisa Abd Elhadi). For nearly 10 minutes we listen as Reema explains the trouble in her marriage to Said (Samer Bisharat) and how controlling and jealous he is. If you are paying attention you can see a quick shift in Huda’s demeanor as the conversation turns to Said and his jealousy. It’s subtle but it’s there and it is the trigger for the rest of the story.

What Reema doesn’t know and we are about to find out is that, Huda, though she is Palestinian and living right on the border with Israel, is a traitor working with Israeli occupiers. Huda’s treachery involves blackmailing young women such as Reema into becoming unwilling spies. How Huda organizes her blackmail scheme, I won’t reveal here. I will only say it is shocking and viscerally presented. Director Hany Abu-Assad uses the mundane nature of the opening 10 minutes of Huda’s Salon to set up a punch that lingers for the remainder of Huda’s Salon.

The plot complications begin when, after recruiting the desperately unwilling Reema, Huda finds herself captured by Palestinian secret Police. As it happens, the Secret Police have been monitoring Huda’s operation for some time and happened to move on her place just after she’d gathered her blackmail information on Reema. The Secret Police, fronted by Hasan (Ali Suliman), are unquestionably going to kill Huda, but first they want her to give up the names of the women she has blackmailed.

Bubbling underneath the tough and volatile exchanges between the equally tough minded Huda and Hasan is the unspoken tension over the likelihood that regardless of whether these women have become informants, the secret police will kill them. This includes Reema who has yet to even have time to have betrayed her people. The stakes for the Secret Police and the Palestinian government are too high to leave anyone alive who might be working against their cause.

Thus the plot turns on how long Huda can hold out on giving up the names and locations of her victims. Meanwhile, poor Reema becomes aware that Huda has been captured and is convinced that her life will soon be over. She’s dealing with a figurative sword at her throat while her husband sees her new demeanor as an indication that she’s hiding something. Indeed she is hiding something but not the something he thinks she’s hiding. Reema strongly believes that if she tells her husband what is really happening, he is likely to simply turn her in and she’s likely to never see her baby daughter again.

Even the title Huda’s Salon has a role to play in setting the tone of this thriller. Going in without knowing the stakes, the title sets you in a space where maybe you are just going to see a slice of life in a Palestinian community fully occupied by Israel. The title is a clever bit of misdirection, it’s mundane and yet it is exactly what the movie is about. Huda herself, may not be at the center of the plot, this is mostly Reema’s heartrending story, but her salon, this seemingly average, every day business, is a pivotal spot in a seemingly unending violent conflict.

The title reflects how every aspect of life on the border between Israel and Palestine is fraught with conflict. Even someone as seemingly benign as a hairdresser may have a bigger role to play in the generational conflict between people desperate for control over their piece of what they believe is holy ground. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is high stakes and those high stakes are at the heart of Huda’s Salon which brings the massive conflict down to an incredibly human and visceral level.

Huda’s Salon is a powerhouse of performances and suspenseful storytelling. The tight knit crew of actors, really only four main characters, manage to make this tiny movie feel like a massive commentary on world affairs and the nature of unending conflict. Take away the world politics and you still have a taut thriller and an exceptionally well played character piece. The movie gets its edge from the real life conflict while never seeming to exploit that conflict for cheap dramatics.

Huda’s Salon was given a limited theatrical release by IFC FIlms on Friday, March 4th, 2022.