In actor-director Nadine Labaki’s soft-glowing comedy, “Caramel,” five friends of different cultural backgrounds convene regularly at a beauty salon in Beirut.
Owner Layale, a Christian, loves a married man. Shampooer Rima pines for a long-haired lovely who drops in with tantalizing frequency. Muslim Nisrine is increasingly anxious as her nuptials approach; her wedding night will reveal that she isn’t a virgin. Jamale strikes bold poses that don’t conceal her fears of getting older. And Rose, a gentle, 65-year-old seamstress, appears to have shelved personal happiness to care for her mildly challenged sister.
Each has her issues. But they all have one another others’ backs.
Salons are among those familiar film settings that allow for intimate chatter, tart humor and a variety of voices.
Yet in her directorial debut, Labaki achieves a meeting of the known and the surprising — not least because many audiences know so little about the daily lives of women in the Middle East.
How welcome Labaki’s vision is became clear when “Caramel” premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. The movie is slated to open in Denver on Friday.
This wasn’t her first visit to the famed fest.
“I always tried to sneak in, or beg people to give me their tickets or say I’m a producer or wait in line for hours,” she said in a recent phone interview.
This time, doors were opened for her. She presented her film onstage. She didn’t crash the seaside party. She and her film were the party.
“It was like a sort of revenge for me . . . a sweet revenge,” she said.
Which is not a bad choice of words for a movie that takes its title from the sticky, sweet concoction of sugar, lemon juice and water boiled into a paste, then used for hair removal by women in Lebanon. (Nair just doesn’t have the same inviting ring to it.)
Labaki, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jihad Hojeily and Rodney Al Haddad, wanted to make a film about “ordinary people,” she says.
“Because I think there is such beauty in ordinary life. I think it deserves to be on the big screen. It deserves to be entertaining.
“I wanted people to feel they were observing other people’s lives. People who look like them, walk like them, talk like them, dress like them. ”
And, except for Layale, Labaki’s central characters are played by nonprofessionals.
It turns out ordinary life can be tricky to cast.
“Of course it was hard to find them,” she says. “We looked in public places, in restaurants, in our families. And I just fell in love with these people, with their personalities, with the way they are. In the film, I didn’t ask them to act, I asked them to be themselves in the situation.”
Though she didn’t intend to take a role in her film, Labaki found when running lines with her potential performers that they were put at ease playing scenes with her.
“I discovered when I was playing Layale with them, it just made them feel more comfortable. It made me their friend somehow.”
The camaraderie radiates. And cinematographer Yves Sehnaoui has imbued the film with a golden warmth.
Labaki once said that “the Lebanese woman always feels as if she is stealing her moments of happiness.”
She stands by that provocative observation.
“Lebanon is not a place where women feel imprisoned. But at the same time, there’s still this weight of society, and the way society looks at you. The weight of tradition, or education, of religion that gives you the impression that you are always doing something wrong.
“You end up leading a parallel life. You always end up lying in order to do what you want. . . .
“You steal your moments to live what you want to live.”
So, is she still stealing moments?
“No,” she says without hesitation. “I’m just expressing myself.”
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com; also on /madmoviegoer
