Posted: 04/24/2006

The Beauty Academy of Kabul

(2006)

by Robin Menken

Liz Mermin’s The Beauty Academy of Kabul is an engaging, buoyant documentary about a group of volunteer American hairdressers, Beauty Without Borders, who open a beauty school in Kabul to train Afghan women in the latest hair and cosmetic tricks. Western style salons represent a release from the burka, a return to normalcy, and a viable career for a generation of women denied education under the Taliban.

Twenty years ago, Afghanistan was a moderate country. Kabul rivaled cities in the West. The Taliban regime and decades of war literally bombed it back to the “stone age”. During the Taliban regime women supported their families with clandestine beauty salons in their homes. Taliban women, unbeknownst to their husbands, frequented the salons.

Two Afghan-American teachers return to Kabul for the first time since their mini-skirted youth, driving in amazement through the skeletal remains of their city. To them, each student is a sister they leave behind, a seed for the future.

The Afghan students are indefatigable. We see their home salons, set up in bombed out buildings, without sinks, running water, electricity. They share their horror stories, leavened with laughs, each survivor’s tale a testament to the human spirit.

We meet a tag team of American volunteers. In a country where men have never taken orders from women, the first team grapples with setting up the school, yelling at their “lazy” electricians and sullen customs agents. It is a sight to behold, a cartoon of the enormous divide between cultures. We don’t know whose side to take. Unaware of the traditional strictures facing these women at home, brassy Debbie preaches the full-blown gospel of Beauty, haranguing her students for not wearing make-up. Yet even this doesn’t faze her students. When Debbie throws off her scarf, defiantly driving through crowds of hostile men drivers, her students see her as a welcome harbinger of change

The contrast between the meticulous school and the meagre homes of the students is surreal. The contrast between the beauticians’ ideology, straight off the catwalks, and the practical problems of the first-ever class of the Kabul Beauty Institute creates a dialogue that’s timely, optimistic and surprisingly funny. Don’t miss it!

Robin Menken is a film critic and veteran of the Hollywood lifestyle living ‘la vida’ in LA.

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