“The Beauty Academy of Kabul” is a documentary that will likely strike mixed feelings in viewers.
| Clueless: Mixed report on a new hairdressing school in Afghanistan. The stories of Afghan women are interesting, but their American teachers come across as so culturally clueless they might have stepped out of a comedy sketch.
Rated: Not rated; probably PG for subject matter Now showing: Varsity |
On the one hand, this film follows an admirable cause. In the summer of 2003, a group of American hairdressers went to Kabul, Afghanistan, to help train Afghan women to become beauticians.
If that sounds somewhat trivial, understand there are underlying issues here. For one thing, hairdressing is one of the rare occupations women can pursue in male-dominated Afghan culture. For another, the subject of women and fashion had been thoroughly demolished by the Taliban, so the re-establishment of hair salons has a political tinge to it.
Besides, a woman who makes $6 a day from cutting hair will, at the end of a month, have made more money than a government minister.
So far so good. The mixed feelings come from the American hairdressers who – entirely laudably, let’s acknowledge – go to Afghanistan and volunteer to help out. These ladies appear to have stepped out of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch about insensitive Americans blundering onto foreign soil.
Whether it’s braying to the assembled Afghan students (who have, let’s remember, just survived about 25 years of hell) that they’re “stuck in a rut,” or soulfully describing how important hairdressing is to healing the soul, these professional beauticians conjure up a divine sort of cluelessness more appropriate to Rodeo Drive than the Middle East.
My favorite squirm-worthy moment came when one classy, thoughtful hairdresser says, “It seems to me a lot of the women are fearful of their husbands,” as though it’s just dawned on her that there might be societies that aren’t as open-minded as the suburbs of Long Island. Ouch.
This becomes inadvertently hilarious at times, and you wonder how director Liz Mermin wants us to see these well-meaning but maddening women. Luckily, the film is balanced by the presence of some Afghan-American women who left their native country years ago and have now returned to help modernize the place.
And around the edges, a portrait of Kabul emerges, slowly healing itself from decades of ill use. This may be the film’s most interesting effect: a look at a place from a vantage point of the streets.
The women in the beauty school are also intriguing, and you wonder how they might change in the years to come. It would be great if Mermin could bring her cameras back in a few years and chart their progress – this time without their brassy teachers.
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