Huda’s Salon Review: A White-Knuckle Depiction of a Woman’s Entrapment

Hany Abu-Assad’s Huda’s Salon wastes no time plunging us into a world where terror can strike at any moment. The opening sequence—captured in one 10-minute take—shows Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi) at the eponymous salon in the occupied Palestinian city of Bethlehem, getting her hair done by Huda (Manal Awad) as they engage in small talk. Then, suddenly, Reem is rendered unconscious, dragged into the back of the salon, and blackmailed into becoming a recruit for an Israeli espionage ring that Huda belongs to.

Formally, Huda’s Salon is nothing if not effective, sustaining the unrelenting tension of its opening scene for the duration of its runtime. This is complemented by a storyline that’s been stripped down to the essentials, and the deliberate withholding of exposition, which compellingly keys us to the disoriented perspective of an unwitting recruit who’s mostly kept in the dark about the perilous world that she’s been pulled into. But Reem is also a victim of her environment, and Abu-Assad’s absorbingly multi-faceted outlining of a repressive and exploitative society works to compound the film’s ominously portentous atmosphere.

Huda’s Salon is composed of two interwoven narrative threads. One revolves around Reem, in addition to dealing with a newborn baby and an overbearing husband, Yousef (Jalal Masarwa), struggling to cope with the potential danger that Huda’s operation poses to her life. The other concerns a steely-eyed officer for the Palestinian government’s secret police, Hasan (Ali Suliman), capturing and mercilessly interrogating Huda, which involves trying to get her to identify the various other women she’s recruited to spy against the state.

If the dialogue in the interrogation scenes is sometimes needlessly explicit, the moments between Hasan and Huda succinctly contextualize the domestic sphere of women like Huda and Reem. As Huda tells Hasan, her experience as a woman in Palestinian society is one of subjugation, where she’s rarely taken seriously as a citizen and even her status as simply being a divorcee means that she’s looked upon with scorn and can never see her children.

This makes spying on her community easy for Huda, and explains why she recruits women like Reem with jerks for husbands. As he intercuts between the film’s two major plotlines, Abu-Assad presents that macro view of Palestinian society that Huda describes and the micro view of Reem’s domestic life—all to conjure a palpably claustrophobic feeling of entrapment, and aptly so, as seemingly every aspect of a woman’s world here is marked by oppression.

Like Paradise Now, the film understands how people use personal despair to justify their extreme ideologies. But Abu-Assad pushes this idea into provocative new terrain by depicting the human effect of dangerous political activities. Hasan and Huda may be on different ends of the ideological spectrum, but Abu-Assad sees either of them achieving their goals invariably resulting in people like Reem being restrained by the constant fear of punishment. And the way that Huda’s Salon so fiercely sees people’s lack of empathy—their chillingly easy disregard for the wellbeing of others—attests to its own sense of compassion.