Where Do We Go Now?

Where Do We Go Now? Film Review

Directed by Nadine Labaki

2011 ‧ Drama/Comedy-drama ‧ 1h 50m

IMDB         Rotten Tomatoes       Roger Ebert

7.5/10                        52%                     2.5/4

My Rating 

✰✰✰✰ 

"Where Do We go Now?" is a wonderfully clever film dealing with real tragedies about the religious violence and tensions between Muslims and Christians in an isolated village in Lebanon.  The village this film is set in is surrounded by land mines and only one pathway to travel out of the village as well as a graveyard of people killed in the religious violence between Christians and Muslims. This sets a bit of an uneasy atmosphere where the people of this village try to avoid the events from the past from occurring again and manage to peacefully coexist with one another. That is, until outside media comes into the town and propagates information about violence between different religious sects happening outside of the town which causes people inside of the town to attempt to eliminate spreading this information by destroying the television, radio, and burning newspapers. Unfortunately this is a very temporary solution since the Muslim and Christian townspeople turn against one another and desecrate each others religious temples. These tensions slowly rise but come to a climax when one of the characters is killed while on a trip outside of the town to buy supplies where he was killed in a crossfire during an outbreak of sectarian violence. Upon realizing this character's death could cause the townspeople to become outraged at one another and begin to shoot at each other the women of the film devise a clever plan to avoid any more unnecessary deaths for the village. 

This film manages to be simultaneously hopeful and heartbreaking but all in a way that is uniquely satirical. In Roger Ebert's review of the film he critiques "There have been real tragedies here. One mother has lost her child. Emotions that can lead to death are not so easily defused by comedy, and that's the movie's problem." which I do somewhat agree with but the comedy didn't feel out of place or insensitive to the suffering of the people in the town at least in my opinion. But I can see how this critique came to be it is not easy to diffuse the grief of a character losing a child in a way that lessens the impact the movie would like the situation to have especially when it comes to something as serious as the sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon. So this may rub some viewers the wrong way but I have to say that I did thoroughly enjoy the movie and thought that using a comedic way to deal with human suffering is something many of us already do to cope and made the characters feel much more human. My main complaint is that I don't like musicals much at all but the music in this film was really well done and the characters didn't randomly burst into song so while I already am prejudiced towards musicals this one doesn't really feel like the musicals I've grown to dislike and it is definitely worth the watch.