Dolls in hijab, processed cheese and the market

Review

 

BEIRUT: “The route we’re gonna take is the conservative one – What’s ‘conservative’?” The anonymous spokesman for the Syrian company that manufactures “Fulla,” the Arab world’s answer to the Barbie doll, hesitates. “It’s a tricky question,” he tells the camera in English. “Simply put, it’s what is the correct behavior.” He pauses, searching for the right words. “Respecting parents is a conservative value. Taking care … of your little … brother and sister. That’s a conservative value.”

The gentleman’s struggle to depict his product in the best possible light is captured in “Dolls: A woman from Damascus,” the new documentary by Diana al-Jeiroudi that’s screening as part of the Docudays film festival. In its narrative thrust, the film effectively profiles Manal, a middle class mother of two, during three years of her life.

That profile is set against a specific context, one that is by no means restricted to Syria alone. In the early going, Jeiroudi informs you that the resurgence of the hijab (Muslim headscarf) on Damascus’ long-secular streets suggests that conservative dress has become fashionable – something that would have been inconceivable in her mother and grandmother’s day.

She terms this florescence of stylish conservatism in Syrian society a “new model” Islam. Among its symptoms is Fulla. The doll has proven to be as potent a merchandising tool as Barbie was to American consumer culture, and then some. 

Like Barbie’s progenitors at Mattel Inc., Fulla’s corporate creators have provided parents with a wide array of toy cosmetics, so their little girls (and boys) can train to become good consumers of image-altering products.

Fulla’s “conservatism,” however – combined with what appear to be certain eccentricities in the Syrian manufacturing sector – means her market possibilities are even wider than they were for Barbie. “Fulla processed cheese” is among the dizzying, and amusing, array of merchandising spin-offs. Another is the Fulla prayer-shawl-and-prayer-mat-in-a-Fulla-shoulder-bag.

Jeiroudi asks whether the “new-model” Islam, of which Fulla is a symptom, really reflects the inner lives of modern women like Manal. 

Sequences that follow her through her homemaking duties, family visits and reflections upon personal fulfilment are interspersed with excerpts of Fulla’s expansive marketing life.

Bright, pretty and energetic, Manal says that she graduated from high school with little desire to go to university, deciding rather that it was time to get married and have kids. That said, she did work as a journalist before marriage and found satisfaction in doing work with some social relevance. She gave up her job, she says, when it cut too deeply into the time she needed for the kids.

The film seems to track Manal as she comes to terms with her increasing feelings of restlessness – which crystallize for her when her former boss asks her to come in for a couple of hours to help transcribe one of the Syrian president’s speeches. 

She applies for work and finds an opportunity with a television station. Her husband seems glum but noncommittal about whether she should work or not – remarking that, before she complained about wanting to work, she used to complain about having to work. It seems her mother-in-law is responsible for discouraging her the most, informing Manal that a mother’s job is to raise her kids.

Though “Dolls” is only her second film, Jeiroudi is a significant figure in Syrian documentary film. Along with her filmmaking husband Orwa Nyrabia, she co-founded Damascus’ DoxBox – a serious little documentary film festival that seeks to cultivate links between Syria’s nascent doc-making community and international industry standards in the form. It is no surprise then, that this film is a Syrian-Danish co-production.

While it remains focused on Manal’s story, and the specificities of the Damascene middle class society to which she belongs, “Dolls” is a sub-plot of a more complex global narrative of socio-economic and political change. 

By whatever criteria you prefer to measure it, the world appears to have become a more conservative place than it was 50 years ago. That’s not just true of the Muslim parts of the world. Like their co-religionists hereabouts, many conservative Christians in the West have resorted to politics to reshape the moral landscape in which they reside.

A political constituency is just another way of saying “consumer market,” as they say, and entrepreneurs are as active in creating market demand as politicians are in cultivating the fears and desires of their constituents. 

“Dolls” can’t be reduced to such compact aphorisms, not least because Jeiroudi refrains from preaching, rather allowing her audience to ponder how the Fulla ads reflect off Manal’s daily routine. Still, an awareness of the mutually reinforcing plate tectonics of society, economy and the politics of family (if not the state) does echo incessantly in the background as Manal goes about her daily chores. 

While Manal and her daughters Naya and Yara are absorbing the endless stream of saccharine Arab television, an ad comes on for the Fulla prayer-shawl-and-prayer-mat-in-a-Fulla-shoulder-bag. Nayla perks up that she wants to pray and her mom invites her to do so, smiling as the youngster begins her pantomime of worship.

At another point in the film, an ad for Fulla processed cheese flashes by. “Naya,” Manal asks, “do you want some cheese, Mama?”

It’s not difficult to piece together the role Fulla is probably playing in forming an affluent class of devout Muslim consumers in the Arab Middle East – just as Ken and Barbie have played a role in reflecting America’s secular consumer culture and offering tots a model to emulate.

Some audience members might comment that “Dolls” would be a stronger film if more effort was made to render these connections more explicit. Then again, perhaps such sermonising should be left to critics.