“In August 2003, a group of hairdressers from America opened a beauty school in Kabul.” That’s the kind of opening line that makes you lean forward in your chair, and Liz Mermin’s documentary The Beauty Academy of Kabul doesn’t disappoint. Bankrolled by the U.S. beauty industry, six volunteer hairdressers journeyed to Afghanistan as part of an organization called Beauty Without Borders. Their mission: to open the city of Kabul’s first beauty academy, instructing the women of the former Taliban stronghold in the finer arts of haircutting and coloring.
More than one reviewer has suggested this sounds like the ideal setup for a Christopher Guest movie, and the missionary zeal of the American volunteers indeed produces some priceless surreal moments. “Make sure you’re getting enough sleep,” lectures one instructor gravely to her burka-clad pupils, in a storefront classroom where soldiers can sometimes be seen cocking guns outside the window. When a volunteer intones that they’re “saving the world, one person at a time,” all you’d need for an easy laugh is a cut to Eugene Levy.
But Mermin’s provocatively ambiguous direction doesn’t play up the absurdity of the situation or make fools of the women. The instructors—three of whom fled Afghanistan for the West, one after losing her husband to violence—defy brassy stereotypes of nail-clicking gossips. Beauty school seems innately weird, in the same sense as intense scrutiny of any narrow topic; but the women take its practicality as a given. Maybe toting perm rods and blond wigs to the wartorn Middle East sounds like a frivolous idea, but in a country where a hairdresser can earn a man’s $40-a-month salary in a single week, it’s a matter of survival.
And pride. When the Taliban seized power in 1996, after a decade of political turmoil that Mermin deftly outlines in a swift montage, the rulers outlawed education and work outside the home for women; they also imposed a strict dress code of full body coverage. “Our work was ruined,” laments one underground salon keeper, who saw her clients’ carefully tended hair and makeup smudged by their mandatory burkas. That didn’t stop women—even the wives of Taliban leaders—from making their way to her speakeasy-like salon, even when the risk meant a beating or worse. A beauty treatment became a modest act of subversion—a reclaiming of self, in the company of similarly oppressed women.
The Beauty Academy of Kabul intercuts profiles of the Afghan beauticians with the progress of the academy’s first class. But the movie is less striking for the story it tells than for the fresh, unprecedented glimpses it offers of Afghanistan—not just of the rubble-strewn postwar landscape, but of a sophisticated prewar country with fashion shows and a thriving social set. Nothing in the movie, except the rubble, fits the preconceptions I had about the place and its people: they seem remarkably tolerant of outsiders, even if the school’s male workers tend to chafe under orders from women.
It’s also an unusually good-looking documentary: in Lynda Hall’s superior cinematography, even the city’s scarred streets and storefronts have an indefatigable vibrancy. The same can be said for Mermin’s subjects—and yet she refuses to sentimentalize them or milk their suffering. “It’s unbelievable what they’ve gone through,” marvels one volunteer, “and they’re smiling!” True—but when a Kabul resident oversees the ruins of his family home, or a woman recalls seeing other Afghan women doused with kerosene and burned by the Taliban, the same reflexive smile registers on each.
You can argue, with justification, that the women who join the beauty academy of Kabul are exchanging one form of servitude for another: what are the strictures of the U.S. beauty industry, after all, but another set of imposed images—another kind of burka? Setting up shop in Kabul is just colonizing another market: one resonant sequence shows the Afghan students combing interchangeable Barbie heads that look nothing like theirs. But there’s an optimism and sincerity about the hairdressers’ mission that’s just as quintessentially American. Whether they can be separated is something The Beauty Academy of Kabul leaves for you to decide—just like a hairstyle.
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