Beyond the Multiplex

"The Beauty Academy of Kabul": Healing the women of Afghanistan, one perm at a time

Liz Mermin's documentary "The Beauty Academy of Kabul" is a spiny, puzzling and highly entertaining film, and whatever you go into it thinking, you're likely to come out thinking something else. Mermin spent 10 weeks in Afghanistan, filming the efforts of a group of women in the American beauty business -- some of them Afghan émigrés -- to launch a professional-grade beauty school in Kabul, shortly after the fall of the Taliban.

If you think that sounds like a nutty idea, you're not alone. As Mermin explains over coffee in her Manhattan neighborhood, she saw a tiny item in the New York Times about the planned beauty school in September of 2002, and immediately sensed the opportunity for a film. "My first reaction was, this is just so crazy -- how could this be real?" she recalls. "My second reaction was, how could this not be amazing? This was clearly going to work people up, and I like films that get people talking."

Mermin's first feature film, "On Hostile Ground," was about the increasingly difficult situation faced by abortion providers in the United States; she refers to herself without hesitation as a feminist filmmaker, and describes her politics as "very far left." And while she's an attractive woman with dark ringlets and silver jewelry, she does not appear to be a major consumer of conventional beauty products. Given all that, "The Beauty Academy of Kabul" is a nonjudgmental and ultimately quite sympathetic account of what at first appears a bizarre and misguided adventure.

The film assembles a kooky and continually surprising cast of characters, from the Afghan women who virtually beat down the new beauty school's doors to the émigré women, haunted by their return to an almost unrecognizable country, to the white Western fashionistas whose reasons for being there never seem entirely clear. How you feel about this last group of American and British women -- one of them a flame-haired loudmouth from small-town Michigan who becomes the film's unlikely heroine -- will largely determine whether you view the Kabul beauty academy as inspirational or ludicrous.

When Mermin met some of the Afghan-born hairdressers in the U.S., many of them educated professionals who had turned to the beauty business because their English was poor, she began to see the whole project differently. "They told me that hairdressing had literally saved their lives. For them, it's a very practical way of helping people, of creating bonds and connections, of forging communities of women. I realized I had to be a little less dismissive."

In fact, it would require both a heart of stone and an ironclad ideological blind spot not to be moved by the Afghan women in Mermin's film, who embrace the Kabul beauty school as an oasis of joy and pleasure -- not to mention economic opportunity -- in lives that have had precious little of those commodities. As Mermin discovered, many Afghan women had clandestine beauty salons in their homes under the ultra-repressive Taliban regime, and after the U.S. invasion they were eager to go legit.

"You know, when I went there, I fully expected that the women would be traumatized and beaten down," Mermin says. "Kabul is not a cheerful city. It's very gray, no one wears colors, much of the place has been bombed into rubble. And at first the Afghan women who came to the school were very restrained, very nervous, very inward. Two weeks in, I realized that was all a facade. I was blown away by how outgoing and inquisitive they were, how outspoken, how lively. They flirted outrageously with any men that were around; they laughed constantly. It was a total transformation."

In fact, the real contrast in Mermin's film is between the Afghan women who create this atmosphere of frivolity and joy and the white Western instructors -- mostly products of the New Age-informed, painfully self-aware New York fashion world -- who view the whole project with intense seriousness. These Western women deliver grave lectures about meditation and massage techniques, or about the sacred mission of hairdressers to "heal Afghanistan, one woman at a time," blissfully unaware of the ruined society around them, where a few years earlier women were beaten with clubs or set on fire for minor or imaginary moral transgressions.

On the other hand, hey, if hairdressing can bring some delight into the lives of Afghan women, maybe it really is healing them. Why the hell not? Mermin reports that some film-festival audiences have been angry with her for not exposing the whole beauty-school project as an American propaganda ploy, or an ideological tool of the cosmetics industry. You can certainly read "The Beauty Academy of Kabul" in those terms if you care to, but it's a much more complicated and interesting story than that suggests. On one hand, it's a half-comic chronicle of cultural collision and misunderstanding, and on the other it's a fable about the irrepressible human desire to have fun and look fabulous, even in the most dire circumstances.

Mermin admits that the prevalence of "over-the-top, self-aggrandizing healing-speak" among the Western instructors sometimes made her skin crawl. On the other hand, it apparently motivated them to travel halfway around the world, to a bombed-out city, to do something tangible for women who lived there. "The Beauty Academy of Kabul" is an intriguing and marvelously open-minded film, in the finest documentary tradition, that should, as Mermin says, get people talking. Cynical urban viewers may find themselves annoyed or otherwise discombobulated in places, but Mermin says that when she screened the film for a group of beauty-school students in Tennessee, they were reduced to tears. "If people respond that way to the material," she says, "my personal reaction really doesn't matter."

"The Beauty Academy of Kabul" opens March 24 in New York; April 7 in Santa Fe, N.M., and Washington; April 14 in Chicago; April 21 in Boston and Hartford, Conn.; April 28 in Los Angeles and Seattle; and May 5 in Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Santa Cruz, Calif., with other cities to follow.

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