Hoi Maya

Two elderly ladies meet unexpectedly at a hairdressing salon one day. Maya recognises Charlotte, and Charlotte recognises Maya. But Maya pretends she doesn’t know Charlotte. Their unexpected meeting reawakens memories of their youth together and the two women find themselves confronted with a story from way back in their past, of which they’d rather not be reminded...
About the film
70-year-old Charlotte (Heidi Diggelmann) has been a regular at Carlo’s hairdresser’s for years. Like Maya (Monica Gubser), also 70, who also enjoys the attention of the hairdressers Carlo (Werner Steiner) and his young employee Luigi (Kenneth Huber). One day, when Maya comes to the hair salon without an appointment, she sees Charlotte under a drying hood. Totally petrified, she briefly stares at Charlotte, and leaves in great haste. A short while later she comes back and sits down next to Charlotte. But Maya doesn’t dare talk to her. She is tense and agitated as Carlo attends to her, while Charlotte keeps on chatting to Luigi, oblivious to Maya’s presence. It is only when Maya marks her presence with a snappy insult that Charlotte realises who’s sitting next to her. Even Charlotte is left dumbfounded by the encounter and leaves the hairdresser’s without talking to Maya. Carlo and Luigi immediately suspect some secret between the two ladies, but Charlotte and Maya remain silent. Instead, they try to find out more about each other through the hairdressers.The unexpected encounter has awoken memories of the old ladies’ youth. As young girls, Charlotte and Maya (played by Simone Oswald and Dominique Lüdi) were close friends. But when Charlotte departed for Paris when she was 17, without returning and without ever writing so much as a single word, they lost sight of each other. Charlotte and Maya appear to have become quite different, almost alien, from one another. The sudden reunion is too much for the two old ladies, for it has scratched open old wounds. Both of them are finding it difficult to make the first step towards reconciliation. Thanks to the silent complicity of the charming hairdresser Luigi, they engage in the first conversation after decades of silence. And now Maya finally wants to know the truth: why did Charlotte never give her a sign of life? Now Charlotte tries to win back her youth friend. Finally, it is Maya’s secret admirer Gubler (Hans-Joachim Frick) who, inadvertently but at the right moment, sees to it that the two friends find to each other again.
 
HOI MAYA is an affectionate and playful film about a serious subject: about the love of life and about (homosexual) love at old age, and about the courage it takes to leap over one’s own shadow and start one’s life anew. (Source: www.hoimaya.ch)
>>> Watch trailer on hoimaya.ch (english & french subtitles)