Early on in “Huda’s Salon,” a tense, tricky psychological thriller from Palestinian writer-director Hany Abu-Assad, a woman named Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi) races down the street in a panic, clutching her baby daughter to her breast. Reem has suffered a terrible ordeal and is anxious to get home, though for a moment she pauses beside the massive wall surrounding the city, lingering in front of a spray-painted image of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. Did I mention that this is Bethlehem? It’s a nervy juxtaposition, somehow both subtle and overwrought, from a filmmaker who doesn’t always trust us to grasp what he’s saying — and whose efforts to ensure that we do can be touching and maddening in equal measure.
What he’s saying is that under the weight of the Israeli occupation, the walls are always closing in for Palestinian women like Reem — and also like Huda (Manal Awad), the local hairdresser whom she’d considered, until recently, a trusted friend. The story begins with an astonishing sequence in Huda’s salon, where Reem has come for a seemingly routine appointment; the vibes are so relaxed, the chatter so casual, that it’s a shock when Reem loses consciousness and awakens, sometime later, to a shattering new reality. Huda, it turns out, works for the Israeli Secret Service, and she’s entrapped Reem, who must now become an informant herself or risk being (falsely) branded an adulteress. Reem emotionally disintegrates as only the innocent can; the guilty Huda remains impassive and unmoved: “We’re in the same boat,” she says.
They are indeed, and for more than the obvious reasons. Years earlier, we learn, Huda fled a rotten marriage; Reem is stuck in one, to a jealous, controlling man named Yousef (Jamal Marsawa). It’s Yousef’s distrust that makes Reem such a vulnerable target, and while Huda insists there’s nothing personal about whom she chooses to blackmail (Reem is the latest mark of many), she clearly takes a certain satisfaction in targeting — and perhaps even liberating — the wives of raging misogynists. She’s taking aim at a Palestinian patriarchy that, in her experience and estimation, is as loathsome and oppressive as the enemy she’s aiding.
