Fear of deportation underlies the spirited banter of Jocelyn Bioh’s broad but lively, all-female workplace comedy, set in the titular hair salon in Harlem. Not that you’d know it from the bulk of the daily interactions between these West African and African-American women, which chiefly consist of rivalries, gossip, romantic upheavals and the buying of socks and jewelry from itinerant street vendors.
And of course, there’s the meticulous, laborious, finger-blistering process of braiding hair, which is very convincingly evoked. Over the course of a single sweltering New York day in 2019 we become au fait with the hierarchy of chairs in a salon and acclimatised to demands for packets of real hair bought from Malaysia or China: “No 2 at 38 inches!”
