CARAMEL
Directed by Nadine Labaki. Starring Nadine Labaki, Yasmine Elmasri, Joanna Moukarzel. Opens Fri, Mar 21.
3 1/2 Stars
Caramel was Lebanon’s submission for Best Foreign Film at the 2007 Academy Awards, and it didn’t have a hope in hell of winning—or indeed, of even getting a nomination. Handing the award to Caramel would’ve been like handing the Best Picture Award to Beaches in ’88—both are chick flicks par excellence, but they’re still chick flicks. Then again, so was Titanic....
Caramel follows the lives and loves of six women who work at and patronize a beauty salon in Beirut. Director Nadine Labaki takes a starring role as Layale, the nexus of the social group, a woman carrying on a sad, doomed affair with a married man, as well as a flirtation with a shy, handsome traffic cop.
Rounding out the group are an aging beauty queen, a young bride-to-be, an elderly woman experiencing a late-in-life crush on a French aristocrat, and an even older woman afflicted with a sort of amusingly sweet senility. (Why is senility always played for laughs in these kinds of movies? Isn’t it supposed to be sort of a quiet tragedy? Anyway....) There’s also a brief intimation of an unspoken lesbian attraction between a beautician and a customer.
There’s not much of a plot weaving Caramel’s six stories together (the title, incidentally, refers to the substance used for body waxing at the salon), but Labaki falls into a laid-back, graceful rhythm as she cuts from one character’s story to the next.
So yes, it’s a rom-com, and a fairly predictable one, but an honest, engaging one as well—and it’s fun to spot all the ways in which it’s similar to and different from Hollywood entries in the same genre. For example: while it’s nice to see a film about the Muslim world that doesn’t play into stereotypes about Muslim culture, and isn’t about religious zealotry, there are nonetheless a few situations that would be unlikely to come up in an equivalent American film. One of the characters briefly ponders whether or not to have hymen-restoration surgery prior to her wedding night so her husband will believe her to be a virgin—somehow I don’t think Carrie Bradshaw will face the same dilemma in the upcoming Sex and the City movie.
Later on, Layale tries to find a hotel room for a night with her married paramour, but all the hotel desk clerks ask for ID proving her marital status. So she’s forced to rent out a room in a dingy dive where she’s assumed to be a prostitute.
Minor cultural differences aside, the lives of these women feel like they could be lived almost anywhere, and the light and frothy mixture of comedy and quirk will probably make Caramel a trans-national, word-of-mouth success story. (It’s already landed Labaki on Variety’s “Ten Directors to Watch” list.) Its universal appeal is sort of nice, proof that no matter what religion you practice, what country you live in, or what language you speak, the girls at the beauty salon are pretty much the same everywhere.
