Review of Where Do We Go Now?

In a small village in Lebanon, Christians and Muslims live peacefully side by side. They speak the same language, enjoy the same TV shows, they share broadly the same culture, only their religion divides them. However, peace is only apparent since violent conflict seems to arise within a hair's edge. It is up to the women of the village to try to pacify the men (sometimes with outlandish schemes) and quell any arguments which could degenerate into a war. In this obvious crowd pleaser, director Nadine Labaki (who also has a role as one of the Christian women in the village) tries to paint the village as a microcosm of Lebanon in the years after the long, brutal Lebanese civil war. If the film is to believed, the country is only in a weak truce before Christians and Muslims are at each other's throats again. I wasn't too impressed with director Labaki's previous film Caramel, but this one is pretty enjoyable. On the minus side, the humor is perhaps too broad at times. And a subplot where a group of Ukrainian women dancers are drawn to the village in a harebrained plot to pacify the place seems pretty weak.