Caramel

One of my old friends from Syria has recently moved to London. She stayed over at my place for a couple weeks before finding a flat and moving out. So far she has given me 2 wonderful gifts for my hospitality, both were visual feasts and I would have missed both if it wasn’t for her invite.

My friend unknowingly dragged me (and I have to admit that I was a bit cautious the first time so dragging is the word) to 2 non English speaking films! The first was in Persian* “The Kite Runner” and the 2^nd was Arabic, “Caramel/سكر بنات”.

I have to admit that if I was on my own, I wouldn’t have chosen to watch either of the two, for me going to the cinema is a time to disconnect from the real world and lose myself for a couple of hours. I like the collective psyche that you get from watching a film at a movie theatre, the audience laughing, gasping and cheering together. Taking that into consideration, watching a film that appeals to a niche market wasn’t much my thing but my friend has asked me to accompany her, and I’m too polite to say no!

What I got as a result of my politeness was breathtaking! I will write at another time about “The Kite Runner” it deserves another take before I can comment on the film, suffice to say that it was close to being a spiritual experience not just a movie.

The 2^nd film that my friend suggested, and I was a more willing companion this time, was “Caramel” or “سكر بنات”. A fellow blogger has already mentioned it here, and I’m happy that the film is getting some headlines as it is surely one to watch.

The story is very simple, it’s simple as life seem to be in a quiet Beirut street in a middle class area, everything goes by in its normal slow pass that is a trade mark of such neighbourhoods. A seemingly simple life at a seemingly simple time and the lives of four girls working at a beauty saloon with a satellite of characters surrounding them.

This simplicity is quickly dismissed once you’ve scratched the surface of the story! Tales of the forbidden and the unobtainable are tangled with the society’s views and taboos surrounding the female entity in our sunny orient.

Caramel, is a symbol of the simple act that all women are joint with, it’s sticky sweetness is that of a society’s view of what should be and not what is there. In it’s simple basis, it hides the painful differences that a woman have to suppress in order to fit into a structure that catalogues her in a rigid structure of looks, status, purity and sexual orientation; departing from that structure is not permitted and that same society has created the means to maintain this structure even by falsifying and masking the truth.

The simple/complexity of the story is mirrored in the langue used in the film, while the words are simple, common with no unnecessary pretence, the acting and the music complete the structure of the scene. One of the most breathtaking dialogues was with Rose sitting in front of her mirror preparing for the hope that arrived 30 years late only to be held back from her later day's dream by the ranting of Lili. You didn’t need words to read the conflict between duty and the simple hope for happiness. The words were redundant in that scene, the music was heart breaking and the acting was unbelievable.

The film touched on a number of challenging topics, some relevant only to our eastern society (purity, sexual orientation) and some relating to all women in all places and times, how the illusion of love can degrade someone, holding on to lost youth and how happiness is found in what we let go of rather than what we pursue.

I don’t know how a non Arabic speaker would rate this film, not being part of the culture, not understanding the usage of language that no mater how accurate the translation is, it can never convey the meaning of some of the words used. I know that for me and my friend, watching this film together at a west end cinema in London, we were transformed home for 90 minutes. In a way, I didn’t want it to end, I wanted to stay in that simple, sun drenched Beirut street and embrace more the different life that passes by there.

The last scene of the film was enchanting, crazy Lili gathering the discarded papers in the street with Rose, trying to find what a lost lover has written to her somewhere, sometime we don’t know about. How many of us walk through life chasing these pieces of papers? Never finding what we’re looking for but never giving up the search…

Caramel by director/actress Nadine Labaki

*Thanks Paolo!