Huda’s Salon: Betrayal and blackmail in informant-ridden Bethlehem

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-plus

The Netherlands-based Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad is best known for his two Oscar-nominated dramas, Paradise Now (2005) about two Palestinian friends recruited to become suicide bombers, and Omar (2013) about a young prisoner coerced into becoming an Israeli informant. 

Both dramas won critical acclaim, and some predictable controversy, for integrating a political theme with a tense thriller atmosphere, making the abstract headlines immediate and personal.  

Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi) agonizes in Huda’s Salon,

More recently, Abu-Assad made the plane-crash drama The Mountain Between Us (2017), based on an existing screenplay, with Kate Winslet and Idris Elbaa. The director said he had no intention of making another Palestinian drama but was drawn back to his birthplace when his wife asked him if there weren’t stories of women worth telling. 

The genuinely shocking first 15 minutes of Huda’s Salon begin calmly. In a small salon in Bethlehem, the middle-aged owner, Huda (Manal Awad) chats with and washes the hair of her sole customer, a young woman named Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi), who has brought her infant daughter, Lina, to her appointment. 

The two chat and exchange complaints: Reem had a row that morning with her jealous husband, Yousef (Jalal Masarwa). Huda complains that business is bad because too many young women try to copy social media instead of getting a proper hair style.

Then, abruptly, things turn sinister. I won’t divulge the specifics of what happens, but in the aftermath, Reem finds herself caught in a horrible dilemma: Either she becomes an informant for the Israeli secret service or she will be publicly humiliated and her life put at risk.  

Abu-Assad’s script draws on reports of women who were blackmailed by the Israeli intelligence agency, Shin Bet, to work for them. And while I can’t authenticate the specific methods depicted in the film, the practice of using shame to blackmail Palestinians into becoming informants is an acknowledged tactic.  

As American academic Nadia Elia wrote in Middle East Eye in 2021:  “Israel also has a longstanding and multifaceted practice of manipulating patriarchal and homophobic Palestinian structures, especially conservative perceptions of ‘honour,’ to recruit collaborators and fragment Palestinians.”

Still, it’s quite a different thing to discuss the double bind of military occupation and a male-dominated culture, and to experience that fear viscerally.  In that regard, Huda’s Salon is a distinct success.

From the moment Reem recognizes the bind she is in, she is in a state of shock, her eyes staring into space, clutching her child close while waiting for a dreaded phone call. She must maintain a semblance of normalcy in the apartment she shares with the neurotic, possessive Yousef, a man she doesn’t love and can’t leave. 

(As grim as the situation is, the script finds room for an  unexpected “yo mama” joke: Over a family dinner, Yousef cites “research” that says women who never have children maintain their beauty. “It’s too bad your mother didn’t retain her beauty,” Reem responds.)

The complicated part of Huda’s Salon, and the riskiest in terms of holding the audience, is that this is actually the story of two women: Not just Reem, but that of the salon keeper, Huda.

Shortly after Reem arrives home, we learn that Huda has been watched by the Palestinian resistance, who have guessed she is recruiting informants. 

After an accomplice is brutally dispatched, Huda is taken to a dark room to be interrogated by a man named Hasan (Ali Suliman).  Their back and forth conversation is like a perverse first date, as they talk about each other’s backgrounds and what brought them to this fateful encounter. Huda, who says she has “been expecting this moment for a long time,” treats the interrogation with a grand resignation. 

As the film cuts back and forth, between the increasingly terrified Reem, and unnaturally calm Huma, it loses some momentum, and becomes less of a thriller than more like a pointed polemic.

“Which enemy?” asks Huma at one point. “Everyone’s the enemy. It’s easier to occupy a society that is already repressing itself.” 

Huda’s Salon. Written and directed by Hany Abu-Assad. Starring:  Maisa Abd Elhadi, Manal Awad, Ali Suliman, Omar Abu Amer, Kamel El Basha, Jalal Masarwa