We were hoping this movie would just fall into a forgotten pile, but thank to Netflix it has been resurrected and therefore a few words must be said about Yalla 3a2belkon. For a movie that seems to want to critique the status quo of what is compulsory heterosexuality* and that really goes for a girl power theme, I have to say I felt a lot missing and a lot contradictory in Yalla 3a2belkon (aka Single, Married, Divorced). I do want to point out that, like most industries, the film industry is tough on women actresses, directors, producers; to these women (like actress, writer, and producer Nibal Arakji) who make it and others who are struggling for female representation in the film industry you have my utmost respect and encouragement.

Having said that, while still supporting these artists, it’s still very important that other women be able to have a take on the art and state whether or not they felt it represented them, and here I need to say that Yalla 3a2belkon really got under my skin and bothered me.

Attempts at a new-age progressive dialogue

Appearance of girl power, yet no power to girl at all. A spitting image of exactly what is wrong in Lebanon already. Appearance of liberal society, display of consumerism, and access to finances and resources that makes women appear “more liberated” than surrounding countries, when it is not really.

A look at high-end living Beirut, where middle and middle-upper class girls drive fancy cars and only frequent super private and expensive places. Even interest in art, and the buying and selling of art, is done to portray status.

Racist undertones. Racism is "tackled" yet used as a punch line, a joke. Being told your Egyptian boyfriend should be employed at gas stations, or proposing a Sudanese worker, for comic relief, as potential husband to the hopeless, woman in early 30s, “spinster”. While the script is made to dismiss these statements as racist comments, they still manage to pass these scene as funny jokes. The dismissal of these racist jokes is meant to leave you feeling ok with laughing about the racism within.

I found it incredibly rude that when the main character (Yasmina) goes to see her Egyptian boyfriend in Cairo and winds up unexpectedly sitting with his wife asking her how she can accept how he treats her. Basically, classy Lebanese woman blames Egyptian woman, who is portrayed juggling a number of babies, for accepting that her husband cheats on her and that she shouldn’t stand for this. Even worse is that the script has the Egyptian woman saying “our society is like this”; the hypocrisy and superiority of making this seem so unacceptable by Lebanese women’s standards, while her Lebanese friend also dates a married man back in Beirut.

It is promising though that the movie does, in passing, critique compulsory motherhood, stating that not every woman wants to be a mother, and that it isn’t every girls dream.

On body shaming

There is a lot of body shaming - at both men and women. Body shaming of anyone that isn’t skinny and fit, or built and well hung. From the man who ejaculated prematurely and got thrown out of the house, to stating that some guy’s dick is so small it wasn’t even worth it. Surely, we know that sexual pleasure isn’t in the size of a penis, otherwise everyone who has ever slept with a well-endowed man would always be pleasured, and everyone who’s ever been with a smaller dick man would always be unsatisfied – yet we know that the pleasure does not exponentially increase with dick size.

I would have understood if the hit at men’s bodies was some sort of payback for all the hits women face with fat shaming, and having to uphold an impossible standard for beauty, yet that was not even apparent in the movie. Women who had any kind of plastic surgery were mocked, and the “natural” were absolutely of fit and - socially deemed - perfect bodies.

On the male-gaze** of women’s conversations

Let’s take this movie to a Bechdell test***.

Were there female characters?

Yes.

Where they ever talking to each other without men in the scenes?

Yes.

Where they ever talking to each other about anything else than a man?

Absolutely not.



Please don’t tell me that you think it’s impossible that women talk about anything else than men. How about one of the characters’ cancer? That barely got a conversation. No one had work troubles. No one had issues with their friend or family members that were not related to a man. Even the abortion was more about the break up than the abortion! How is it possible that all these women, who have super busy social lives, all working, all living more or less independently, have absolutely nothing else to talk about than fucking, dating, breaking up, finding someone new, and getting married. I don’t know about you, but that was the part that bored me to death. I was so glad when one character intervened with an “I have cancer” speech, just so that interrupts the psych-minor’s analysis of why none of them can keep a man! Yeah, it was that bad.

On public and private spaces

So many beautiful shots of Beirut were taken, beautiful public scenes of the corniche, the highways, the hustle in the streets, the diversity of its people, the very few public shores that are being polluted and stripped away from us. And yet with all those beautiful scenes from Beirut, the only places that had any conversations were private. Severely private. Sporting, Zaytoona Bay, shops, fancy restaurants, malls, cars (mini coopers), pilates and yoga class. As if Beirut only exists in the private-space. All the characters are hardly ever seen to walk in a public street, and the only public-space scenario was of street sexual harassment.

On dismissing and belittling women’s time and thoughts

How is it that this supposedly super-girl-power-movie condones and allows so much machismo bullshit, I really don’t know. An illusion of women strength when the main character picks up her Egyptian boyfriend from the airport and says to him lets publicly go to your friends’ wedding as a couple, if need be an engaged couple, and agitatedly he says let’s keep things light for and not talk about it. The speed in which she disregards it and says ok take my car keys and drive my fancy car instead. Or when the same woman is on a plane reading her book, and the adjacent passenger “charmingly” displays manhood by interrupting her from the book she is reading (a book on distrusting men, because of course god forbid it should be about anything else) to tell her she should meet him. The candid performance of femininity, the speed in which she disregards that a book was literally ripped out of her hands, is amazing. I could go on really – the scene when the betrayed wife walks into her husband’s mistress’ store and calls her a whore about 3 times, then the mistress back to fight with her boyfriend and says it’s over but then he shows her plane tickets to Venice next week, and voila – instant happiness and forgetting. Also girl, don’t you need a visa? I mean come on! No such spontaneity exists with them Lebanese passports. Istanbul maybe. But Venice!?

This reductive narrative that women just want marriage and sex, even the one that keeps repeating that says doesn’t care about marrying, does propose and get rejected from a guy she didn’t know was married. The super accomplished medical doctor throws a tantrum in the street because she’s itching to find a man. And men seem to just want sex. Thank god there wasn’t a spontaneous “let’s have a make-over” scene to take away all our troubles, I just wouldn’t have been able to handle it. This movie attempts to show that it displays women differently, but throws us back in the same stereotypes.

On forced and wrongly induced abortions

So here are more spoilers, the character dating the married Lebanese guy gets pregnant and is deliriously over the hill because she feels she’s trapped him. Deliriously. Like she looks at the pregnancy test and you can tell she sees a baby and not a plastic stick drenched in urine. Sadly, she’s forced to have an abortion (sadly because no woman should have to end or keep a pregnancy against her will), this abortion takes place simultaneously as her friend undergoes chemotherapy, and is not half as dramatic as the breast cancer itself. Here it’s unclear if it’s the abortion or the breakup she’s falling apart over.

But even more importantly. That is definitely not how one would induce an abortion. It’s reckless and negligent to indicate that two pills placed orally and two vaginally (while in a filled tub of water for dramatic effect) would induce a safe and complete abortion. In using Cytotec, one would make sure to get 12 pills, place four under the tongue, leave them to melt and in 3 hours repeat 4 pills also under the tongue, and again for the third time. Check the World Health Organizations guidance, I don’t make this shit up.

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I mean the movie ends with everyone having found a man, except the one who dated the married guy and had an abortion - a cautionary tale for all wayward girls out there. And to add insult to injury, the main character then looks at the screen and says what are you waiting for, go get yourself a man. A man-prescription that really counteracts the whole man-ailment that is this entire movie. I’d say sorry for the spoilers, but one can’t really spoil the reproduction of everyday clichés, sexisms, classisms, and racisms. You really already know the movie.

Some definitions:

 

* Compulsory heterosexuality: “Compulsory heterosexuality” is a term coined by Adrienne Rich, in the essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980). Compulsory heterosexuality is the hegemony of heterosexual relationships as well as social expectations that heterosexuality is the norm and all other sexual orientations are deviant.

** Male gaze: The Male Gaze theory, in a nutshell, is where women in the media are viewed from the eyes of a heterosexual man, and that these women are represented as passive objects of male desire

*** Bechdel Test: A way of evaluating whether or not a film or other work of fiction portrays women in a way that is sexist or characterized by gender stereotyping. To pass the Bechdel test a work must feature at least two women, these women must talk to each other, and their conversation must concern something other than a man.