Romance is painful in Beirut
Ed West on Caramel
16 May 2008

Nadine Labaki, above, is the director of Caramel and also plays its lead character Layale. The film is too excruciating to watch without covering one's eyes

Five women, five intertwining tales of heartbreak and struggle: it could be any story set in London or New York, except this is the Middle East, or at any rate Christian Beirut. It's like Sex and the City, minus the sex.

Watching a film set in Lebanon one expects to find the usual stuff we associate with that country - bearded radical clerics, angry young men with rocket launchers, bafflingly complicated religious divisions and so on.

But while there is bloodshed in Caramel, it is only the pigeon's blood that wife-to-be Nisrine plans to smuggle into her bridal bed sheet, and the false blood that ageing actress Jamal puts on her skirt to give the impression she is still, so to speak, young.

The film revolves around a circle of friends working in a downtown beauty salon and a tailor's shop next door. Nisrine is a Muslim who is worried that her groom-to-be will realise she is not a virgin, thus the pigeon's blood. Her friend Jamale is a fading bit-part soap star who worries about getting old, and must endure humiliating and excruciating casting sessions alongside women half her age with twice her confidence.

Meanwhile, lead character Layale is having an affair with a married man and seems convinced, against all prevailing evidence, that he will leave his wife; colleague Rima is a lesbian; while poor Rose next door has her first chance of romance when an elderly Frenchman walks into her tailor's shop. Unfortunately, her style is somewhat cramped by her mad, squawking sister Lili, who spends her time collecting parking tickets.

So far, so formulaic: not that that is necessarily a bad thing, since the oldest templates are the best, from Little Women to Desperate Housewives. The story even, in true Richard Curtis style, culminates in a wedding.

Where it differs from standard romantic comedy - which it is misleadingly categorised as - is the abundance of humiliation.

Layale, desperate for a night with her paramour, tries to book a night in a posh hotel; when she is unable to produce identification proving they are married, she moves on to a two-star hotel, where she is also rejected. Finally she ends up in a sleazy, cockroach-infested hole where all the other women who have hired rooms are working. There she spends the entire day cleaning the room and preparing a romantic meal. Does her man turn up? Guess.

Even this pales in comparison to the heartbreaking sight of Jamale trying her best to get a job in an advertisement for cleaning products, pushed around without mercy by the casting director. Later, in one of the weirder, more gruesome scenes we see Jamale pretending to be younger than she is with the help of a bottle of red dye. It's advised to watch such scenes with thumb and index finger protecting the eyes.

In comparison the process of leg waxing involving hot caramel, from which the film takes its name, is easy to watch, even for us chaps.

Visually the film is wonderful, and not in a picture-postcard way. Filmed in fading Mediterranean sunlight, one can almost smell the grime of Beirut and feel the traffic fumes seeping into one's pores. Likewise the scenes involving a religious procession of the Virgin and a wedding are both treats for the eye. The film exudes that slow, southern way of life, reminding all of us why we'd all rather live by the Med (although admittedly Lebanon might not be top of the list right now).

Caramel has already collected a bag of awards. Nadine Labaki, who plays Layale and is also the director, is tipped for big things. She's already well known in the Middle East and will no doubt soon be a household name in continental cinema circles, and perhaps Anglo-Saxon ones.

It was her aim to present a different side to Lebanon, a side as mundane as that of any big city. Luckily the film finished filming just nine days before the Israeli-Hezbollah war of 2006 (which suggests a good idea: I've often wanted a Richard Curtis film to end with a misplaced Israeli rocket killing every single character).

But tragically it is hitting the English-speaking world just as the country seems to be sliding into another civil war.

But at least, then, Caramel is a reminder of the universality of irrational love; Layale, while chasing a married man she cannot have, is herself the object of admiration for Youssef, the decent traffic policeman who waxes poetically to himself while admiring her from a distance. She stares right through him, so reassuring us that, when it comes to idiocy, men do not have a monopoly.