Caramel

A film set in a beauty salon in Beirut. The salon is small. Five women work there or come to it. Layale owns it. She is having an affair with a married man and tells nobody. Nisrine is about to marry. Her fiancé and his family are traditional; she is hiding that she is not a virgin and looking for a way out. Rima washes hair. She is drawn to a client and can say so neither to herself nor to anyone else. Jamale is an actress. She is ageing and no longer gets cast; she tries everything to hide her age. Rose is a seamstress. She works in the next shop and looks after a sister whose mind has gone. From there the film runs the five lines together. None is larger than the others. The salon is a shelter. The women tell each other things there that they can tell nowhere outside. The caramel in the title is a method. Sugar, water and lemon boiled into a wax; the narrative shows it as both ordinary work and a pain. What the narrative is interested in is not love but concealment: its idea is that all five women have to hide something, and that the labour of hiding falls entirely on them. Rose's line is the quietest part. An offer comes to her and she has to choose. The war is outside the narrative. The film gives Beirut through daily life rather than conflict, and that is deliberate. The tone is light. The narrative sits between comedy and drama and overplays neither. This is Nadine Labaki's first feature; she also plays the lead. Most of the cast are not professionals. Nadine Labaki, Yasmine Al Massri, Joanna Moukarzel, Gisèle Aouad and Adel Karam are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes Middle Eastern cinema and stories about a community of women. Who it is not for: anyone looking for hardness; the narrative opens its subjects but takes none of them to the end.