In a tiny cosmetic studio mounted on Beirut, the faces are infectious one injection at a time.
The camera never moves, the bed never shifts, and the woman who performs the bouba procedures remains mostly cramped.
In Omar Mismar’s A confused crazyThe frown is not just a wrinkle to smooth out. It is a symptom, a signal and, perhaps, a position of resistance.
Talada between contemporary art and a healing observation, Omar’s debut, which is currently appearing in his regional competition International Golden Apricot Film Festival In Erevan, Armenia (July 13-20) is not the festival’s typical candidate.
Its quiet but deeply visceral environment, focused entirely on a small aesthetic lounge offering botox and fillers, immediately upset a lot of viewers, Omar admits.
“People said it was difficult to watch, especially those who were afraid of needles – they had to cover their eyes,” he says. “But then, interesting, some said that over time they began to feel numb, as did the movie customers.”
This numbness, both literal and metaphorical, sits at the core of Omar’s concept. He was trained as an interdisciplinary and conceptual artist, often begins with a philosophical research rather than a medium.
This time, it was Susan Buck-Morsss’s essay with title Aesthetic and Anesthetic: Walter Benjamin’s art work was reviewed This caused his thought.
In this, Susan suggests that in a modern world flooded with sensory inputs and trauma, aesthetic experience turns into anesthetic: a numbness of the senses.
Omar mums in this tension: “Botox has become a lens through which to explore how feelings are mediated by the face,” he explains. “Paralysis is not only natural, it interrupts the feedback loop between emotion and expression. If I am angry but unable to confuse, anger itself can change.”
Emotional paralysis in Beirut’s Botox room
His case takes on a visual form through long, static shooting of women and men who are slowly with botox.
Injections are transfers to the daily violence of life in Lebanon – a place that continues to resonate with the aftershocks of the explosion of the port of Beirut, the political and economic collapse, the political and the economic collapse Gaza War event in 2022and the overall social trauma.
In such a context, voluntary paralysis becomes a paradoxical act of control.
The title “Crown” gets a symbolic weight. Bouba, like many aesthetics, uses diagnostics – commands customers to “reach”, “increase” or “smile” to see which areas need injections. But Omar sees more than the superficial trend.
“The frown is an expression of dissatisfaction, resistance, anger, in Lebanon today. It feels like we have exhausted these feelings. There is a numbness, an apathy.
The filming began in September 2023 and with the second session at the Bouba lounge, 7 October, had already happened.
“That’s why the film is made up of the idea of war in Gaza,” says Omar, “but also by the ability of the war to expand to Lebanon.”
Eventually, the war was expanded after the filming had been wrapped. But his ghost remains throughout the minimalist context of the film, which emerges through involuntary conversations and observations.
“There is a kind of narrative, maybe the only bow in the movie,” he explains. “Starts with Bouba asking me.” What do you think? Will there be a war in Lebanon? “And I say, so confident or naive,” no “then I ask her the same, and she also says no.”
But this certainty unfolds. Customers are starting to worry, obsession. Bouba assures them that even if the war comes, they can continue to come, as her business will not stop.
The fragmented timetable eventually folds into an explosion that includes a journalist talking about a colleague who was killed and reports in the port of 2020.
“You almost don’t know what explosion we are talking about or in what time context we are,” he adds.
This time and emotional instability becomes another form of anesthesia – a cultural fog where the past trauma, today’s anxiety and mediated violence combine each other.
For Omar, this is directly linked to the cosmetic impulse.
“There is a constant volatility – political, military, financial,” he says. “Everything slides away. So the person becomes the last border, the last battlefield where one can regain control.”
When aesthetics turns into politics
Bouba, whose work is aimed at the state – as if there were no more pressing issues in the country, as she suggests – welcomed Omar to her workplace without hesitation.
“It was incredibly open,” he says. “He talks to study and do so for years and how the state only pretends to be interested in legality in this particular area – as if it were the only form of corruption.”
Indeed, the involvement of cosmetic culture with power systems runs deeper. Gay signs For the role of Lebanese banks they once played to promote plastic surgery loans in the early 2000s.
“You will see advertising loans advertising loans for rhinoplasty or fillers – $ 5,000 only to get a nose job and people got them,” he says. “It feels that a beauty regime is formed in which banks, state and the media were all partners.”
This artificial empowerment – giving people a sense of agency for their appearance while controlling the media – reminds him of Walter Benjamin’s argument for fascism: providing expression without rights or substance.
“It is not necessary that the state is interested in the beauty of per se. It is convenient to peace about people with the illusion of control, especially over their own faces.”
In this light, aesthetic interventions become deep political acts – both as organs of peace and as possible resistance sites.
“Maybe it’s time to think about this regime again,” Omar reflects. “To find a way to think again, to revive anger, to move the stagnant we live.”
Clock cosmetic
Despite its central position, Bouba rarely appears from the front and we do not see her face. The limited space of the living room initially dictated this decision, but eventually became an aesthetic and narrative principle.
“There was little any room to adjust the tripod,” Omar recalls. “And he hated the camera. He says it in the movie while he is doing botox for a customer who says he loves to be on TV and Bouba replies:” I hate the camera.
It was a non -existent agreement: the work could turn around, but Bouba will not perform.
The media also play a silent but powerful role in shaping cosmetic imagination.
Omar reflects at a time after the explosion of the 2020 door: “A few days after the explosion, I saw a sign, I don’t remember if it was already there or recently placed, but showed a typical Botox clinic before and after the picture, just as the city was covered with glass pieces.”
The confrontation stayed with him.
“This virgin, glossy, created by the media of perfection, which has put in relation to the complete destruction-was made grotesque, but also revealing, we may not be able to separate the images of the media, the cosmetic processes and the real, physical violence.
Even beyond Lebanon, Omar sees this phenomenon reproduced in all environments.
“The media play a huge role in the enforcement of gender rules. They almost always aim for women, with Euro-American ideals of beauty: wide eyes, tiny noses, big lips.
The surreal and poetic
The film, consisting of a minimal cinema movement and a single point, still manages to open huge conceptual territory.
Omar mattresses The material with surreal breaks-syllables with texts based on texts and clips that resemble social media.
Some are taken directly from Bouba’s WhatsApp stories, where it advertises its procedures with slogans such as “we bombed prices”.
Others are original creations: poetic, melancholy lines that suggest rolling through a food during breakdown – “I have lost the feeling, but the pain has found me”.
“I wanted to feel like a digital ephemeral,” he explains. “These poetic bursts are mixed with the very real, very grounded Bouba content.”
The final processing was its own discovery process.
“At some point, I knew that I had to stop turning around and looking at what I had. For me, filming was like noting, while the editing was the writing,” Omar explains.
An early cut included a voice all over.
“The voice you hear in the end was initially scattered between the scenes, but I realized that I didn’t need it.
This includes moments of courtesy and melancholy that bordered with surrealist.
One woman says she visits the living room not only for treatment but for treatment: “I come here I feel down, and Bouba gives me her touch, so I become the queen who I am.”
Other observations, “all will be well as once Plastic Surgery loans are restored” – a reference to real loans offered by Lebanese banks to finance cosmetic procedures.
“It’s almost surreal, right?” Omar says.
Resistance in view of the control
In the final act of the film, a voice tells the story of a puppet that begins to resist the strings that control it.
The “puppet lines” of the face – crumpled lines on the edges of the mouth, often treated with fillers – become symbols of control and expression.
“Closing these lines can prevent you from moving your jaw,” Omar says, “but maybe where you win the service. If no one can move your mouth for you, you might start talking on your own.”
For Omar, the goal was never to offer a binary withdrawal of aesthetic interventions, pro or anti, but to dispel their emotional and political underground. In a world where trauma accumulates faster than we can process it, the desire to smooth out the pain is deeply human.
“We’re not just frozen wrinkles,” he says. “We play our ability to show that we had enough. And that’s dangerous.”
Mariana Hristova is an independent film critic, cultural journalist and programmer. It contributes to national and international stores and has edited programs for Filmoteca de Catalunya, Arxiu Xènctric and Goeast Wiesbaden, among others. Her professional interests include cinema by European regional and archival and amateur movies
