The movie “Huda’s Salon”: A Victim of the Western Language and its Hybrid Modernity
Palestine is once again facing a significant problem, this time about the screening of “Huda Salon” at the Beirut International Women’s Film Festival in 2022 and other international film festivals. Ali Suleiman and two great actresses, Mayssa Abdel Hadi and Manal Awad, star in the film, which is directed by Hani Abu Assad, a native of Nazareth.
The story of the movie revolves around Huda, whose role is literally played by a banner. She is the owner of a beauty salon who had been recruited to work with the Israeli intelligence and agreed to drop down Palestinian girls who came to her salon and hire them for the same intelligence. Huda attempts to justify her actions by claiming she is a “victim” who fell into the Israeli intelligence’s trap when they threatened to expose her infidelity with another man, so she agrees to work with them by dropping one woman every three months, drugging them, and photographing them naked in her salon while they are with a young man who participated in the drop for a sum of money paid by Huda.
The movie begins with an ordinary conversation between Huda and Reem, played by Misa Abdul Hadi; Reem was sitting in the salon chair getting her hair done, so Huda puts the drug in a cup of coffee and offers it to her; Reem drinks it and loses consciousness. Then, Huda transfers Reem to a back room in the same salon, where she assists the young man in taking Reem’s clothing off and photos her with him lying naked next to her. Reem wakes to find herself in a weird situation, which shocks her; Huda, however, hurries to show her naked images while threatening her with scandal and confessing that she is an Israeli intelligence agent.
I will summarize the discussion of the movie’s plots so that the readers can have a part to watch. The majority of his scenes were filmed in two locations: in Reem’s house, where the focus was on her conversations with her husband, who decides to leave the house with their child after she tells him what she was exposed to in the salon; and in the basement of a unit of the Palestinian intelligence (the Palestinian resistance), whose members arrested Huda and the young man who was her partner in bringing down the victims.
I watched the movie while I was free from the influence of all that I had read about it, particularly the criticism and attacks of those who fanatically targeted its director and actors, stigmatized it with shame, and prohibited pornography; I do not agree with those who initially object to the use of nudity scenes inappropriate dramatic contexts, and consider their presentation to be accepted harm and pollution to the “pure and healthy” spaces of our societies, and absolutely harmful to our most important “sanctities” and our social, cultural commendable and religious values.
It is clear that the debate about the right of artists to use nudity in some of their works will not be resolved, in our ailing East, on the “back” of Hani Abu Asaad’s film. However, even if we recognize his right as a director of global stature, and the right of his partners in filming that scene, our right as viewers remains guaranteed to question him about the purpose of this employment. To ensure that it contributes to the flow of the drama, its illumination, and the strengthening of its messages as they came from his mouth. This is in contrast to a tool that was inserted with the intention of seduction or disruption in order to help the marketing of the movie.
I say this admitting that I did not believe that the scene of nudity with which Hani Abu Assad began his movie came from a purely artistic or professional necessity or as a dramatic illustration of his idea, without which the idea would be ambiguous and incomplete. The fact that the director of the Arab world prepared a version of the movie without the aforementioned nudity scene, while making copies with the scene for other festivals and “civilized” countries, strengthened my perspective. Is this not sufficient justification to question him about the validity of his creative decisions and the basis of his positions?
The Orient remains immersed in its illnesses and sick sexual fantasies. Although the brief nudity scene should have remained a minor detail in connection to the rest of the movie’s events, the vast majority of people, regardless of whether they saw the movie or not, have made it the central issue.
Although I am amazed that a normal person can watch the scene of a woman being stripped naked in suggestive circumstances while she is drugged and unconscious as an irritating pornographic sex scene and not as a horrendous crime in which the most heinous action was to naked the victim. I witnessed the futility of our society and the nakedness of injustice.
The purpose of the movie was to shed light on a critical issue that Palestine has been experiencing since the first day of its occupation. These are the persistent attempts of Israeli intelligence to recruit agents from among Palestinian citizens, particularly among the targeted and socially vulnerable groups, chief among them being women who suffer from the oppression of their patriarchal societies and who are subject to fear, exploitation, and facing one of two options in times of adversity: either communication with Israel or the scandal, and the reactions that would follow. from it, “Siafo al-Zohour” is good for border residents in our country.
Hani Abu Assad, the hard-working director, didn’t succeed because he didn’t present a new creative material(content) that would highlight on the issue of employment with Israel from innovative and non- consumable angles. The recruitment of agents’ issue, whether women or others, is a case that Palestine lives as a permanent concern and sleepless obsession. It has been treated in many artistic and literary forms that the movie “Huda Salon” didn’t add new contents and dimensions.
The most events of the movie took place, as we said, in one of the basements of the Palestinian intelligence, where, before Huda’s execution there with a gunshot, confronted the investigator, the acter Ali Suliman, and conducted a challenging dialogue with him, in which she explained the reasons of her betrayal and her downfall, until he seemed to understand her and pity her. What happened in the basement wasn’t realistic and reasonable and most of this dialogue was poor, which sometimes affected the performance of the actors as it appeared more in the role of the actor Ali Suliman.
I live in Palestine and work there as a lawyer defending its people for four decades. I know a lot of stories of pain which the movie tried to touch on and how the issue of recruitment of agents in favor of the Israeli occupation was still dangerous and disturbing. However, I feel that the success of occupation over past years by creating the atmosphere of suspicion about the citizens’ loyalty to their cause and the ease of their recruitment for it is the major issue that must be faced. The prevalence of the phenomenon of loss of confidence, as we notice in recent years, is one of the most important factors of defeat. I think that the risks of this tragedy, particularly in these times, have been lost on the filmmakers’ minds.
I didn’t understand what exactly Hani Abu Assad means from this riddle; this language may be understood in the west and on the threshold of the challenges of “nonsense modernity” or perhaps it is an art language of “the era of insignificance” arts that the west created and took care of it.
As for Palestine, we live one large challenge and speak a clear language in which the occupation is always the executioner and the victim is Palestine, its land and its people. If you want, allocate women among them.
In response to those who criticized his film, as the sites transferred, Hani Abu Asad stated that the story of this movie is real; where “the Israeli intelligence used the presence of Beauty Salons to bring down Palestinian women.” This itself a big statement, and inaccurate, because I do not know this amount of Beauty Parlors that exploited to bring down Palestinian women. As a result, accidentally ofcourse, this statement could lead to increase doubts among the plestinian people specially against the owners of beauty salons. In this context, Hani Abu Asad added also that “One of the tasks of the filmmaker is to discuss different areas related to the topic.” He confirmed that “He took on a very big risk in this thing, limited the filming to two locations and just three actors; as he attempts to present scenes based on visual dependence.” I am not sure what is behind this. I am not a professional film critic, but as a viewer, I live the reality of Palestine in its details; I felt that this film does not achieve its goals. Even if it does not include fairness to its family and bias to their mother’s cause. It was obligatory to condemn the occupation and its practices but we did not watch her directly because the movie tackled it by using metaphor “magic” and only hints. And if the oppression of Palestinian women is their concern, they misrepresented its crisis because the exposure to it took place in contradictory intersections that led to her unfairness or to keep its case in a problematic state, which they did not succeed in dismantling.
The movie left us facing an equilateral triangle: the occupation, Palestine, and its victims, and kept us in a shaky, blurry state close to the point of deliberate confusion. Perhaps we will find that the reason that made us feel like this is buried in the chest of the director, who explicitly declared that “the great challenge posed by the film is not to determine who the victim is and who is her executioner,” adding that “it is possible that whoever you consider an executioner is the victim himself.”
By: Al- Quds Newspaper
