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Caramel Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: PG (for thematic elements involving sexuality, language and some smoking) Genre: Comedy, Romance Theater release: February 01, 2008 by Roadside Attractions Directed by: Nadine Labaki Runtime: 1 hour 36 minutes Cast: Nadine Labaki (Layale), Yasmine Elmasri (Nisrine), Joanna Moukarzel (Rima), Gisèle Aouad (Jamale Tarabay), Adel Karam (Youssef), Sihame Haddad (Rose) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

If Caramel were a Hollywood big-studio comedy, instead of a Lebanese comedy set in Beirut, it would come with a PG-13 rating rather than a PG, and it would be peppered with brassy sex-related dialogue and class/race/gender-baiting humor.

The story could still be centered on a beauty salon as the hub of activity in the lives of a mostly female ensemble cast, although plot needs would probably require some creaky, contrived crisis such as a threat to the salon's future. One of the characters might still learn a hard lesson about getting involved with the wrong man, but "the wrong man" would be a generic creep rather than, say, a married man.

Instead of Muslims and Christians, the social mix would be largely black and white—and characters would discuss this constantly, with little epiphanies of racial enlightenment along the way (hopefully for members of both groups, if the filmmakers could manage it). There would also be a more or less binary division of good characters and bad characters, with slimy men and snobby women in the latter group.

Nadine Labaki as Layale

No one would smoke, religion would be invisible, and every plotline would be neatly tied up by the film's end.

All of this wouldn't necessarily make it a bad movie, for example, if it starred Queen Latifah and was called Beauty Shop. But if there's a reason to see Lebanese actress–director Nadine Labaki's Caramel, a substantial part of that reason is the film's Middle-eastern cultural milieu, providing more than just exotic flavor.

As the name implies, Caramel is a gooey, insubstantial confection, often sweet, occasionally cloying, sometimes sticky—in many respects about on a par with the likes of Beauty Shop. The humor is broad, characters stereotypical, the situations formulaic. Yet there's no good/bad character divide, no requisite A-story conflict, and few tidy resolutions. Milder in presentation than Beauty Shop, Caramel is more mature in content, touching on dicey subjects from adultery to same-sex attraction without the adolescent brashness of the homegrown product.

The beauty salon in Caramel is run by Layale (Labaki), who is having an affair with a married man and struggles with the shamefaced jealousy and curious envy of the Other Woman. Even more than last year's Waitress, Caramel confronts the potential homewrecker with the domestic side of the equation.

In some ways, it's a Middle Eastern version of 'Beauty Shop'

Meanwhile, Layale fends off the attentions of a reserved but handsome traffic cop who routinely calls her short on her frequent traffic and parking violations, giving her tickets he knows she won't pay, just to spend a minute with her. This subplot provides one of the film's most delicate scenes as the officer, wistfully watching from afar as Layale steals a few minutes on the phone with her lover, imagines himself on the other end of the line, and offers self-deprecating responses to what he supposes she might be saying.

Stylist Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri) is engaged to a young man who's liberal enough to fondle his fiancée's knee under the table during a family dinner—much to the inquisitive astonishment of the young boy hiding under the table—and to foolishly risk trouble with Beirut's morality police by sitting with her in a parked car at night outside her house. Yet is he open-minded enough to be able to deal with the revelation that Nisrine isn't a virgin? To what lengths would Nisrine go to avoid such a crisis?

Frequent client Jamale (Gisele Aouad) is an unwillingly aging never-was actress still trying out for bit parts in TV spots, doing her best to hide her years with coiffure and sartorial choices, even bits of strategically hidden Scotch tape in lieu of an eye job. Jamale's tryouts are uncomfortably embarrassing, but ostensibly even more embarrassing is the preempting of a scheduled tryout by a female hygiene predicament—though a later revelation puts her situation in a more pathetic light.

Layale and Rima (Joanna Moukarzel)

Here and elsewhere, Caramel touches on the intractable grip of the cult of beauty on female self-worth: the endless pains to which women go to look their best; the deep pride and satisfaction that even a withered old woman may take in making herself up for the first time in years; the delight in the unforeseen charm of a completely new look. (The film's title refers to a sugar confection treatment for hair removal, a jarringly methodical process that quickly dispels the aura of sumptuous decadence promised by the appetizing opening montage.)

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