A new, fresh, glamorous and original musical: Soha Hesham is impressed with Nadine Labaki's latest The Lebanese music video director-turned-filmmaker Nadine Labaki's second work -- the musical Hala' La Wein? (Where do we go now?), recently released in both Lebanon and Egypt -- comes after her debut Sukkar Banat (Caramel), which she directed, starred in and co-wrote in 2007. The latter film, a romantic comedy about five Lebanese women who gather in a Beirut beauty salon, dealt with love, sexuality and various kinds of personal disappointment, leaving aside all the political issues of Lebanon. Though featured in festivals around the world, it was not well received. Hala' La Wein?, which won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and was screened in Cannes's Un Certain Regard, is a musical set in a small village in Lebanon and starring Labaki as Amal, whose story it tells. The film opens with a black-clad group of women of all ages marching to a cemetery, each holding the picture of her husband or son, with which they beat their own breasts in a traditional gesture of grief, their stylised movements sliding into dance. The village is isolated from all the political and sectarian conflicts which unavoidably they hear about on the radio, on TV and in the newspapers -- the viewer senses how the women of the village seek an isolated and peaceful life with Muslims and Christians living in harmony when they are seen burning newspapers that contain worrying news. Friction between Christians and Muslims in the village begins in a series of comic scenes -- when the holy water to be used for baptising a baby is replaced by chicken's blood or goats are let loose in the mosque. Amal, a Christian widow bringing up her child, is obviously in love with a Muslim man named Rabih (Julian Farhat), whom she later blames for picking a fight with a Christian who makes fun of Muslims for having their shoes stolen while they are praying. The women of the village constantly try to divert the men's attention away from such frictions in various ways: faking a miraculous conversation between the mayor's wife, Yvonne (Yvonne Maalouf) and the Virgin Mary in attempt to resolve an incident, or commissioning a Ukrainian showgirls band to pretend that their bus has broken down so that they will come into their homes and distract them. In spite of all such attempts, however, the disastrous occurs with the death of Nassim (Kevin Abboud) in which he was killed in the crossfire of a sectarian clash at a nearby town: afraid of setting off a vendetta, Nassim's mother Takla (Claude Baz Moussawbaa) hides the fact of his death from the neighbours and his elder brother, pretending he is ill. When Nassim's elder brother Issam (Sasseen Kawzally) finds out, a huge fight ensues in which Takla goes so far as to shoot him in the foot to prevent a blood feud in the village. The women of the village gathered as they came up with the luminous plan to bake cakes and pastries laced with hashish -- in an original scene with music by Khaled Mouzanar -- to be served to the men of the village, giving the women time to execute their plan -- with the help of one of the Ukranian girls -- of locating hidden weapons and taping men's conversations. Labaki -- along with Jihad Hojeily, Rodney Al-Haddad, Sam Mounier and Thomas Bidegain (who was one of the script writers of A Prophet ), managed to convey a warm and lively atmosphere with the help of the innovative music by Mouzanar and dances that energise the action; with interesting cinematography by Christophe Offenstein, this is all it takes to present a unique ambience. Yet Labaki fails to invest the film with sufficient humour: potentially comic situations like in the scenes between the priest and the imam of the mosque, who collaborate for the good of the village as they try to play peacemakers for their community. Fancifully, by the end of the film, all the quarrels and clashes come to an end when the men wake up the day after the enormous party the women have given to realise that all the women have converted to the opposite in order to stop vengeance in its track. The predicament comes up in the funeral of Nassim, whom they do not know where to bury after all the conversions that have taken place. But it is the imaginary idea of an end to war once women take matters that proves alluring.
