Review: Caramel (4/5)

‘Caramel’, the debut film from Lebanese director Nadine Labaki, is a not-oversweetened treat



Caramel
(Nadine Labaki):
Nadine Labaki, Yasmine Al Masri,
Joanna Moukarzel, Gisele Aouad, Adel Karam, Silham Haddad.
Running time: 96 minutes. (PG)

Caramel, the debut film from Lebanese newcomer Nadine Labaki, is set in a beauty salon in Beirut, in the kind of neighbourhood that has given up fighting the heat: the streets are a bronzed wash of ochre and rust; even the shop front, which in better days signed Si Belle, now displays Si elle, the B dangling upside down as if it had sloped off for a snooze. Inside, the walls are faded like old newspaper, but the place is a hubbub. A flaming redhead by the name of Jamale (Gisele Aouad) stares wide-eyed into a mirror with the first in a series of ever-changing hairdos. “My hair has no volume,” she screeches to her hairdresser Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri), a woman whose own hair is like fizzing cola. But volume isn’t a problem here. Caramel is a film brimming with pitched voices, the bustle of traffic, the brrr of hairdryers and the whirr of life. Inside the din, director Labaki finds space and silence for the tangle of disappointment and happiness in the lives of five different women who coalesce at the salon. Here, the sweet see-saws the sorrow; the comic duets with the poignant. It is richly textured, precocious stuff and totally absorbing.
The owner of the salon is Layale (played also by the film’s director Nadine Labaki; the rest of her cast are unprofessionals). She has sultry oval eyes and is having a frustrating affair with a married man. Beside her works Rima (Joanna Moukarzel), silent in headphones with a tomboy haircut. She washes hair like threading gold and develops a relationship of shy smiles with a female client who keeps returning for a wash despite having a mane that looks fit to squeak. Across the road, there’s Rose (Siham Haddad) a seamstress whose face is folded with faded beauty and sadness. She looks after her dementia-addled sister Lili (Aziza Semaan), who collects parking tickets from car wipers as if looking for a lost letter and provides a large dollop of the film’s comic relief.
Caramel refers to the sugar-sticky substance used at the salon to remove body hair. Only waxing is too soft a word; I imagine it could be called vexing: when Layale entices her lover’s unknowing wife in for a free treatment, she treats her client’s legs as vent for her frustration. Layale goes to great lengths to make time for her lover: she endures the humiliation of trying to rent a hotel room for them (impossible, unless you can prove you are married), and the scrubbing of a rancid bathroom in a brothel-cum-hotel: an act of love and a washing away of seediness. But he doesn’t turn up.
Lurking quietly in the neighbourhood is a policeman with a gaze that could put feathers under her feet. The most swooningly romantic moment I’ve seen at the movies this year unfolds under his secret gaze across the street. (So much of this film comes from discreet glances, or stolen moments through doorframes and windows). He watches her on the phone, talking to her difficult lover, while he pretends to answer her talk with sweet nothings. This is typical of Caramel, a place full of longing and promise, with characters who fizz about in their own orbits, electrons crying out for a collision. There is something here of the hankering and happenstance of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. But Labaki is also working from an entirely different tradition, one that reminded me of Indian humanist Satyajit Ray, whose Apu films were so attuned to the ebb and flow of passing time. Labaki sees fate as something to be willed along by her characters rather than coerced by the filmmaker. And they are left to sort their own problems out.
Nisrine, who is a Muslim, hasn’t told her future husband she isn’t a virgin. “A little pigeon blood on the bridal sheet will do the trick,” suggests Jamale. Nisrine, instead, opts for discreet surgery. (“Tell my husband I’m at the tailors,” she says wryly), while Jamale, desperate about her advancing age, uses blood in clumsy ways to disguise her menopause. And then there’s Rose, long retired from love, until the afternoon an aged gentleman wanders in for a tailor. There are little glances; sparks of attraction flash in the mirror. And then the moment is ruptured by Lili, who comes hollering into the room, dressed like a rag doll in blusher and rouge. Caramel is sweet by name, but Labaki is never going to ruin her picture with a sugar rush. Just when things lean towards the saccharine, it is yanked back with a jolt of reality. And when reality offers letdown, Labaki inflates the moment with aside: a man leaves a café deflated, and the camera dips its gaze to his trouser hem, riding about an inch above the ankle; at a wedding, instead of a bouquet of flowers, Layale gets a payload of bird shit on her head. Such is life.
Caramel is heartwarming because it pulses with honest, generous spirit and the blood of real characters. It is a film awake to the idiosyncrasies of people and place, subtle and suggestive about political difficulties. It’s a treat.