Omar Mismar Examines the Role of Botox in Post-War Lebanese Society
From A Frown Gone Mad, 2024. Courtesy of Omar Mismar.
Lebanese artist Omar Mismar’s latest documentary, A Frown Gone Mad, is a fresh social commentary on war’s impact on everyday life from the point of view of clients undergoing Botox injections in a Beirut beauty salon. Last month, the movie won an award at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA) for its simple, suave, yet haunting vision. The work is part of Mismar’s series of multidisciplinary pieces about Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian societies, covering topics such as oppression, war, and queerness. At the 60th Venice Biennale, for instance, Mismar became viral online for a mosaic portraying a gay kiss between two Middle-Eastern men. Other political mosaics at the exhibition included allegorical commentaries on the brutality of the Assad regime. The pieces were done by collaborating with Syrian master mosaicist Abdel Moneim Barakat, who was displaced in Lebanon by the civil war.
This time, Mismar sits behind the camera in the tiny studio of Botox technician Bouba. Here, he witnesses clients of any gender and religion have their faces punctured and covered in blood to fight off aging. Their watery eyes, lost in a moment of self-inflicted suffering, echo intimate conflicts that have little to do with beauty. “The idea of doing something in relation to filler and Botox as a post-war aesthetic was very much in my head for a long time,” Mismar tells IMPULSE. To clarify, in this context, the term “post-war” indicates a society that has borne witness to violence daily. When I call Omar Mismar again, things in Beirut are slightly more peaceful, although to say that the ceasefire is precarious would be quite an understatement.
From A Frown Gone Mad, 2024. Courtesy of Omar Mismar.
War seeps into the salon as clients casually discuss Israeli strikes, bombings, and old scarring. Memories of angst and suffering test the flattened wrinkles on their foreheads. “In 2020, a few days after the Beirut port explosion, there was a billboard near my house, which advertised for a clinic that does Botox injections,” Mismar says. “It felt preposterous. Who would advertise for this at a time when the city is destroyed?” Instead of barring it as an absurdity and another sign of Beirut being the Botox capital of the Middle East, Mismar decided to explore the connection between artificial beauty and war.
Drawing from the Greek root of the word “aesthetic” (related to perception) and Susan Buck-Morss’s thoughts on modern “anaesthetics,” he believes that the local beauty industry plays an essential role in society by offering to anesthetize the body. A perfect face becomes a buffer between the outside horrors and the effects they create in the psyche, which tends to surface on one’s complexion. “Botox paralyzes the facial muscles. And by doing so, it creates an expressionless face or an apathy,” Mismar says, “which has consequences on how you feel and how you are perceived by or connected to others.”
From A Frown Gone Mad, 2024. Courtesy of Omar Mismar.
In A Frown Gone Mad, this subtext emerges through Bouba’s interactions with clients, which Mismar vows are spontaneous. While the clients lay covered in blood and needles, enduring the pain, the beauty technician cynically reminds them: “Who wants the allure has to endure.” To a client on whom Bouba worked before to heal his scars, she mumbles: “They destroy, and we repair,” hinting at the fact she might have also operated on scars many other times in the past. The man escaped the Beirut port explosion and was filming in the South when an Israeli tank fire killed his colleague, Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah, in 2023.
“You feel there's a more clear purpose for why people are undergoing this type of treatment,” Mismar says, “since even if you're not visibly scarred on your face, on the surface, then you're scarred in so many other ways.” As Bouba says to a client, “in war, our faces sag faster,” admitting she never stopped working in wartime since she often had the most clients when the city was full of domestic refugees.
From A Frown Gone Mad, 2024. Courtesy of Omar Mismar.
War is also part of Bouba’s sense of sarcasm and business shrewdness. When she makes special offers, she announces both to her clients and on WhatsApp stories that she “bombed” the prices. In fact, these footages are interpolated in the documentary, some being pop-art poetry that Mismar conceived to reflect on the Botox-war dialectic, which he considers as “embedded in the [Lebanese] state.” Since the 2006 war, there have been many bank-sponsored plastic surgery loans, including recently. “It’s an attempt to regain some sort of control,” Mismar says, clarifying in a later email to IMPULSE that the “Botox-filler phenomenon can be read as a defense against violence.”
From A Frown Gone Mad, 2024. Courtesy of Omar Mismar.
Mismar started filming A Frown Gone Mad in September 2023 as part of a fellowship from the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics of New York. “By the second time I was there, October 7 had happened,” he says, and the preoccupation of the war expanding to Lebanon seeped into the movie. At some point in the documentary, Mismar receives a notification that there's a complete blackout in Gaza. “People were worried, anticipating, waiting anxiously as to what's going to happen here, how [the Israeli war] is going to expand, how that genocide is going to extend to Lebanon,” he adds. Mismar finished shooting the film in January 2024, before the October Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon. To get to Amsterdam for the festival in November, before the ceasefire, he had to fly with Middle East Airlines, the Lebanese company praised for being the only one to ever fly during every war and amid strikes.
IMPULSE journalist Gabriele Di Donfrancesco watched the documentary via streaming as he could not attend the screening in Amsterdam.
