It’s dangerous business to begin a movie with a voice-over monologue introducing “a long tale of women dressed in black.” Run, while there’s still time! Yet it’s a testament to director and actress Nadine Labaki’s gracefulness she pulls off this story as well as she does in Where Do We Go Now?, a fable set in a fictional town, presumably in Lebanon, where Christians and Muslims live together in bumptious accord, if not in complete harmony.
Actually, the women – those aforementioned creatures dressed in black – get along famously, gathering regularly at the same café for all manner of gossip and chitchat. It’s the men who can’t hold it together: They’re always on the brink of fisticuffs and worse, each group expecting only the worst from the other. Don’t look now, but somebody filled the church holy water fonts with blood – must be the Muslims! Goats and chickens running amok in the mosque? Got to be those pesky Christians! The women are always suffering because of the men: As the movie opens, they stride toward the local cemetery en masse, their procession orchestrated as if it were a Pina Bausch routine, with somber, stiff leg movements and rhythmic breast-beating. The graves – Christians on one side of the burial ground, Muslims on the other – all bear pictures of the women’s lost men, people who have caused them a great deal of sorrow.
The problem, as Labaki and her co-writers Jhad Hojeily and Rodney Al Haddad make clear, is that the men just can’t stop fighting. The village also happens to be located in an area riven by violence – it’s surrounded by land mines, which, in an early scene, kill a hapless goat. (The event is played for laughs, not pathos.) Meanwhile, a tentative romance…
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