Movie Review: Where Do We Go Now?

Besides my regular dose of flashy Bollywood films, it's not often I watch a foreign-language film. But they always seems to pleasantly surprise me - sometimes I need to hear insults, declarations of love, and sarcasm in another language to freshen up my life a little bit. Needless to say, this one was a breath of fresh air.

Where Do We Go Now? (Et maintenant, on va où?) is a comedy/drama directed by Lebanese director Nadine Labaki (Caramel), set in a remote Lebanese village amidst a country engulfed in a civil war. Christians and Muslims live amongst each other, men and women gossip and joke with each other, and the priest and imam live happily as friends with their respective houses of God.

The village has one TV, and possibly one radio, but news of fighting and violence among Muslims and Christians reaches nevertheless. The women, who have lost too many husbands and sons to the war, decide to take action. The fact of the matter is, Christians and Muslims may live together in this village, but not always so peacefully, and the women have no more room to mourn.

What ensues is a mix of the funniest scenes I have ever seen, and the most tragic. Many films disguise themselves as a comedy/drama, while actually just being a straight drama with a few jokes thrown in here and there. But this film really defines the word. What starts as a simple destruction of the village's only TV, turns into hiring a busload of Eastern-European strippers and eventually, feeding their husbands weed cakes. The dialogue is snappy, and at one point, I actually fell out of my theater seat laughing.

At the same time, tragedy is everywhere. Throughout the film, we see that the village is physically connected to the outside world by a small land bridge strip, and a village boy Roukoz, along with his cousin Nassim, are responsible for selling and buying the necessary groceries for the whole village. It's a treacherous path, and it's evident that they continuously face danger from the violence on the outside. Though Nadine Labaki's character, Amale, is arguably the main female character, it's really Takla (Claude Baz Moussawbaa), Nassim's mother, who is the strongest woman of the film. Every morning at dawn, she prays for her son's safe return from the market, having already lost her eldest son (I'm not completely clear about this, as there are many characters, but she has definitely lost a member of her family).

As always, violence breaks out in the village, when the Muslims find their mosque has been trashed by wandering animals - but blame the destruction on the Christians, breaking their Virgin Mary statues, and getting into fist fights in the square. As the little things escalate, the women decide that something must be done, and decide to hire the Eastern-European strippers that Takla has found in a magazine in her son's room. They feed the men a story that their bus has broken down outside the village, and need a place to stay for a week. Oh lord.

This film is a bit of a departure from Labaki's first feature film, Caramel, about five Lebanese women dealing with issues such as love, sexuality, age, and duty vs. desire, which was more of a romantic comedy. Caramel was praised for avoiding a war-ravaged Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, but instead focusing on universal topics.  

I say departure, because Where Do We Go Now? tackles the war head on - just not in a Saving Private Ryan kind of way. Not that it's uncommon for Christians and Muslims to live together, but to see it solidly acknowledged from the first scene is refreshing, given that the same probably does not hold 20 miles away.

What struck me as odd, and is probably my only issue with this film, is the over-the-top "stupidness" of the men. In one scene, one of the men violently grabs hold of a handicapped boy, telling him he will kill his father, and continues to harass him until one of the women must forcibly drag him away, yelling at him, "Is this what it means to be a man?" I find it hard to believe that the men of the village would be so sensitive to the smallest problem, that stolen shoes would justify broken noses and child harassment. It doesn't surprise me then, when Amale loses it in her bakery, half screaming half crying at the men to stop fighting, to stop acting like mindless people, driven only by religion.

"Do you think we were put here to always mourn you?" she screams at them, voicing the sadness of every women in the village. Your mother's tears haven't even finished drying from mourning the death of your brother, she accuses one of the young men.

Still, I must say that Claude Baz Moussawbaa is the star of the film. She begins as a devout Christian women, but with the death of Nassim when he is tragically shot outside the village by a Muslim, she breaks down in such a haze of grief and anger at her precious Virgin Mary, that you grieve with her as she hides Nassim's body in the well, unable to properly bury her son, so that none of men find out and start fighting again. She shoots her now only son, Issam, in the foot when he finds out so he can't leave and act on his intense anger - such is her grief.

The title of the film alludes to the last scene, after the woman have played their last card and switch religions, swapping hijabs for holy water, Allah for Jesus. The men, completely confused, have no idea how to react when they see their loved ones donning the symbols of their enemies. It's both funny and heart-warming, and when the village finally comes together to bury Nassim's body, they stop at the edge of their segregated cemetery and ask "Where do we go now?"

Is Nassim now a Christian or a Muslim?

It's a fairy tale of a story, complete with a few, soulful, song-and-dance numbers. Labaki's narration in the beginning and end makes you think of child's bedtime book. The message is cliche, I'll admit, but the journey towards it is well worth taking.