Nadine Labaki
E ora dove andiamo?

He sees her crying her eyes out on the side of the road. He stops, touches her shoulder, and asks her what has happened that is so terrible, just as any human being would do in the same situation. She has eyes the color of Mars, and gritting her teeth, with trembling lips and hands in the earth, she screams a strangled cry: “My son is dead!” He looks at her with eyes full of compassion and sweetness and then comes out with a “Do you know what’s the height of…?”

I was drawn in by enticing and positive reviews of Nadine Labaki's new work and found myself in Lebanon, in a remote village where Catholics and Muslims coexist. The film would be interesting, as it has a rich and engaging plot, but I was shocked by the changes in pace that calling them risky is a pure understatement.

Imagine traveling on the highway at 150 in the passing lane, and then, without warning, the driver shifts into first gear; the engine, the film, explodes, and it couldn't be otherwise. With absurd speed, with a simple cut and scene change, it shifts from the powerful image of a child's death to the exaggerated happy comedy. The plot loses much of its meaning; it becomes grotesque, unreal, making the good performance of the cast futile, and the various scenes which, if taken individually, would be successful, and yet in the whole appear disconnected from each other. Cathedrals in the desert. In one of these, which creates the premises for the hopeful and sugary ending, opium becomes the absolute protagonist. I can't deny that during the viewing of the film, I had the feeling that this substance also had great importance during the casting phase.

The sudden jerky narrative, shifting from one extreme to the other in a flash, is so exaggerated that it manages to overshadow the other element of critique I feel compelled to raise: the blatant and gratuitous extreme feminism in which all the women embody positive characters, while the male ones that are saved from the camera’s lens are either naive, not to say brainless fools, or lie horizontal under a meter of earth. Politely speaking, it seems to me a rather childish and generalizing vision.

I usually write to encourage going to the cinema: the reason I'm harsh is that I've read comments on the web that are diametrically opposite to mine; the viewing of “Where Do We Go Now?” was also particularly interesting in its being completely disorienting and disappointing. To my eyes, it remains a half-rhetorical mess, overly feminist, which almost completely fails the bold attempt to combine drama, comedy, and musical creating a plastic film that overall fails to convey the strong message of integration and the fight against fundamentalism it wanted to launch.