Available on DVD: “Where Do We Go Now?”

The Lebanese director Nadine Labaki’s blunt, satirical fable, Where Do We Go Now?, takes place in a rural Middle Eastern village where Christians and Muslims coexist in an uneasy peace. The village is ringed with land mines, and its cemetery is filled with the bodies of young men who have died in sectarian warfare.

Labaki’s decision not to name the country, which is assumed to be Lebanon, suggests that she conceived Where Do We Go Now? as an all-encompassing comic allegory about religious intolerance and male belligerence. But the continually shifting tone of the movie, whose director also did the romantic comedy Caramel, keeps you giddily off balance.

The first indication that Where Do We Go Now? isn’t quite sure what it wants to be is a song-and-dance number in which Amale (Labaki), a beautiful Christian widow who runs a cafe, fantasizes a romantic pas de deux with Rabih (Julien Farhat), the Muslim handyman who is painting the place. Is this a musical comedy, you wonder? Not really. The number, which seems like an outtake from another movie, is a playful diversion in a series of skits.

Where Do We Go Now? soon reveals itself as a flighty modern variation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in which the village women, sick and tired of losing their menfolk to senseless warfare, band together to keep the peace by any means necessary. Their solidarity is established in the opening scene, a choreographed march in which a corps of black-clad Christian and Muslim women form a solemn, swaying procession to the cemetery.

The same women gather regularly at the cafe to gossip and devise strategies to keep the men from fighting. Except for an ineffectual priest and an imam, whose houses of worship sit side by side, those men are hotheaded bumpkins who profess brotherhood until the tiniest provocation incites them to blind fury. When a troublemaker sends goats into the mosque, and the holy water in a church is replaced with chicken blood, these dolts go ballistic and reach for their weapons.

One of the women’s first actions is to disable the village’s newly repaired television set, because the news of religious strife in the region immediately stirs up war fever. Amale and the mayor’s wife, Yvonne (Yvonne Maalouf), are the prime movers in this gabby female regiment.

Yvonne, while praying to a statue of the Virgin Mary, fakes a mystical trance from which she relays divine instructions to the men that peace must be kept. In the dead of night some women unearth a cache of buried weapons and hide it.

In their most elaborate scheme, they distract the men by importing a group of Ukrainian strippers who pretend to be stranded after their bus breaks down. As the men gird for war, their wives drug them with hashish-laced baked goods, then give a wild party where the men are pacified by the glamorous, shimmying visitors. If these silly shenanigans are amusing, none are developed into the sidesplitting comic set pieces they had the potential to become.

In the most serious threat to peace, a young man is killed in cross-fire while riding his motorbike outside the village. Rather than tell the men, who would use the incident as an excuse for war, his mother and her friends secretly dispose of his body and spread the word that he has the mumps and is too ill to receive visitors. I won’t describe the women’s final solution to the religious strife, except to say that it is both ingenious and preposterous.

At heart, this jolly, galumphing crowd-pleaser, which won the audience award at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, is a raucous sitcom about scrappy little boys whose canny mamas conspire to keep them out of trouble.