Where Do We Go Now? (2011)
(On va où maintenant?)
Country: LEB/FR/EGY/IT
Technical: col 110m
Director: Nadine Labaki
Cast: Nadine Labaki, Layla Hakim, Claude Baz Moussawbaa
Synopsis:
Desperate at the sectarian fighting in their country that threatens to return to their village community, Christian and Muslim women in a Lebanese village resort to various measures to restrain the bellicose tendencies of their menfolk. These include importing Russian strippers, spiking the local cakes with hashish and converting to the opposing religion.
Review:
However well intentioned and sincere its creator clearly was with this cri de coeur (the title cites the last line, as the funeral cortege asks to which side of the cemetery they are to take the latest victim of violence), the results are muddled and uneven. The film lurches from broad comedy to tragedy like a Vittorio De Sica production of the 1960s, while never making clear the precise parameters of the drama. It clearly models itself on Aristophanes's Lysistrata, but stops short of making explicit that play's peculiar retention of sexual privileges, perhaps through delicacy, or because the men appear so indifferent to anything of the kind. Worst of all, it is just not very well constructed and the characterisation is over-reliant on cliché, so that the scene in which Labaki's character and her heartthrob conduct a spiteful conversation by proxy seems somehow anomalous.
(On va où maintenant?)
Country: LEB/FR/EGY/IT
Technical: col 110m
Director: Nadine Labaki
Cast: Nadine Labaki, Layla Hakim, Claude Baz Moussawbaa
Synopsis:
Desperate at the sectarian fighting in their country that threatens to return to their village community, Christian and Muslim women in a Lebanese village resort to various measures to restrain the bellicose tendencies of their menfolk. These include importing Russian strippers, spiking the local cakes with hashish and converting to the opposing religion.
Review:
However well intentioned and sincere its creator clearly was with this cri de coeur (the title cites the last line, as the funeral cortege asks to which side of the cemetery they are to take the latest victim of violence), the results are muddled and uneven. The film lurches from broad comedy to tragedy like a Vittorio De Sica production of the 1960s, while never making clear the precise parameters of the drama. It clearly models itself on Aristophanes's Lysistrata, but stops short of making explicit that play's peculiar retention of sexual privileges, perhaps through delicacy, or because the men appear so indifferent to anything of the kind. Worst of all, it is just not very well constructed and the characterisation is over-reliant on cliché, so that the scene in which Labaki's character and her heartthrob conduct a spiteful conversation by proxy seems somehow anomalous.
(On va où maintenant?)
Country: LEB/FR/EGY/IT
Technical: col 110m
Director: Nadine Labaki
Cast: Nadine Labaki, Layla Hakim, Claude Baz Moussawbaa
Synopsis:
Desperate at the sectarian fighting in their country that threatens to return to their village community, Christian and Muslim women in a Lebanese village resort to various measures to restrain the bellicose tendencies of their menfolk. These include importing Russian strippers, spiking the local cakes with hashish and converting to the opposing religion.
Review:
However well intentioned and sincere its creator clearly was with this cri de coeur (the title cites the last line, as the funeral cortege asks to which side of the cemetery they are to take the latest victim of violence), the results are muddled and uneven. The film lurches from broad comedy to tragedy like a Vittorio De Sica production of the 1960s, while never making clear the precise parameters of the drama. It clearly models itself on Aristophanes's Lysistrata, but stops short of making explicit that play's peculiar retention of sexual privileges, perhaps through delicacy, or because the men appear so indifferent to anything of the kind. Worst of all, it is just not very well constructed and the characterisation is over-reliant on cliché, so that the scene in which Labaki's character and her heartthrob conduct a spiteful conversation by proxy seems somehow anomalous.