July 8: Where Do We Go Now?/Et maintenant on va où? (2011 -- Nadine Labaki)

★★★★

This film is a mix of a lot of unexpected and mostly incongruent elements.  It’s partly drama, with intense scenes of family and sectarian conflict.  There’s a lot of comedy, too, as the women sabotage the village’s news-bearing TV, import blonde prostitutes, fake religious miracles and bake drug-laced cookies in an effort to distract the men from religious conflict.  And Where Do We Go Now is also willing to occasionally break out into song and dance music numbers like those from Dancer in the Dark.

But only after all of this is blended together does the real impact of Where Do We Go Now – the profound intransigence of religious conflict and the severity of the suffering of the women caught in it.  Though they have to live together, the men and women of the village constantly dig at each other with little affronts to religion and culture, and every small dig risks escalating into civil war in the village.  And these provocations aimed at each other’s religious beliefs and dress are mean and have little humor in them.  Such conditions are certainly eye-opening to those of us who live in more pluralistic cultures where religion is generally secondary to making a living and getting along for the civil good.  Where Do We Go Now does a great job of showing what such riven environments look like from the inside.

It also shows the pain of women in such a split patriarchy.  The village cemetery is divided between Muslims and Christians, but it’s filled with the young men of both religions; the film opens with a musical number as the women head out to clean the graves of their lost husbands and sons.  Where Do We Go Now brings the accumulated pain of the cemetery into focus when one woman loses her youngest and is scared to tell the men of her own family for fear of igniting a round of recriminatory violence.  And there is a scene of a woman wounding her own son with a gun in order to prevent him from being involved in sectarian violence.  Not even romantic love can overcome the divide in this village as a trans-religious attraction falls victim to the religious strife.  As though all this suffering weren’t enough, the women finally resort to changing their faiths to the opposite religion, a move sanctioned by the religious leaders of the village, in order to prevent the men in their families from fighting with those of the other religion.  It’s heart-rending to see women who’d proudly worn or not worn scarves all their lives suddenly renounce a lifetime of religious observance.

Good world cinema takes us into a culture we have no other window into, and that’s exactly what Where Do We Go Now does.  Its mix of genres is interesting, perhaps drawing on cinema tradition I’m not familiar with.  But the real contribution here is the way the film takes us inside the minds of the religious conflict in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East.  Comedy may lighten the message a little, but the insight is real and heavy.