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31 of 33 persons found the following review helpful.
...and ugly goes right to the bone.
By Jean E. Pouliot
"The Beauty Academy of Kabul" is a documentary with regards to a group of American women hairdressers who travel to Kabul to instruct hairdressing to Afghani women in the post-Taliban era. The film has a lot of positives, mainly it is consultations with the women students. Surprisingly, a good deal of seem cheerful. A few talk in regards to the war or the Taliban. But versus the backdrop of bombed out buildings and ruined villas, their laughter is evidently a defense versus unbearable inner pain. The glances of their lives -- the houses they live in, the music they listen to, the images they watch and the structure of their families -- is priceless.
While I admire the Americans for their act of kindness, it becomes clear early on that they are closely totally insensitive to the mores of the Afghanis. The students, basi of all, are survivors of a brutal regime in a male-dominated, Islamic society. Under the Taliban, galore risked punishment to run beauty salons out their own homes.To listen these women being lectured by know-it-all Americans was ghastly. Almost to a person, the Americans were arrogant and insensitive. One woman figured she would single-handedly "liberate" the streets by driving a car -- unheard of in that country. The stares and glares she received did not seem to faze her. Another woman engaged the students in pre-class meditation -- something that will have to have seemed bizarre (and faintly heretical!) to these Muslim women. Most of the teachers treated their students as rookies -- unmoved that they had been working in the business for years and years. Overall, the Afghani women were serious, devout, family-oriented workaholics. The Americans -- beauty-obsessed, swinging singles and into New Age religion if any at all -- epitomized the stereotype that Americans are loud, brash, disconnected and uncaring.
This was not a feel-good story when it comes to cultures learning from one another. It was a story in regards to one culture enduring the rudeness of another in return for advancing it is own agenda. It's not clear whether the filmmakers were conscious of how amazing their subjects looked. It's not clear that they realized the horrific rudeness that was being recorded. Anyway, horrors and all, "The Beauty Academy Of Kabul" could have been a outstanding film had it troubled to ask a few questions, such as, Now that the Americans have left, are you glad they came? What did you think of them? Does meeting them make you more or less receptive to Western values? And so on. It was a major shortcoming that the film left these questions unexpressed. Still, the value of a glimpse into real life in an alien culture was quote worthwhile.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
worth viewing
By JWG
Not withstanding the vanity of the western women, this is a poignant, agenda-less film that documents the gap amongst the east and west, and the modest aspirations of Afghani women to show their visage in public.
This movie is surely interesting in demonstrating the chasm amidst among eastern and western effeminate mores. Nothing like a bunch of dead family members to cement a reluctance to adopt western fashion. Certainly the chasm is so substantial that it is hard to fathom that a term such as "love marriage" exists on this planet, but there it is. And the flakiness that is celebrated in the west as "diversity" and "enlightenment" is exposed in this film for it is weirdness. Afghani society is not so tolerant of conduct that is outside the lines.
If not one thing else, we have a misinterpretation of gaps; we have westerners hoping to cross decades of divergence when the gap is centuries. And yet the resilient women of Kabul, a good deal of who have never known peace recognise that they are right and that the battle is not a matter how but when. This is not a story with dramatic twists or stunning turns, but a modest story of cowed women taking modest steps to assert themselves in a society that abruptly stopped caring what women had to say and only now minimally more than willing to consider their contribution. It is a moving story of little acts of courage in the face of cultural retardation.
5 of 5 humans found the following review helpful.
Hairdressers out from hiding . . .
By Ronald Scheer
This revealing and most times amusive documentary follows the attempts of various western women to open a beauty school in Kabul, Afghanistan, in the days following the fall of the Taliban regime. Here the feminist assumptions of the school's instructors collide with the realities of life for women in a more traditional, male-dominated Islamic culture.
The filmmakers have been invited into the homes of galore of these women and we learn a outstanding deal when it comes to their values and aspirations, as well as what is expected of them. When a young single woman reveals that she is "in love" with a young man, she makes the filmmaker promise not to tell her mother, who would strongly disapprove. A married woman speaks of living through the sovereignty of Taliban terror that kept women house-bound, and another describes secretly working as a hairdresser for the duration of those years in her home - in defiance of the law. The beauty school instructors may make you cringe, but you'll admire their students.
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