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Instant Favorite.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Nadine Labaki's debut features has a lot of the trappings of a typical rom-com but it eschews the stereotypical neat ending of the genre to become something more. Featuring a cast of non-actors (led by Labaki who takes on a leading role) the movie revolves around a group of women working in a beauty parlour in the Christian district of Beirut. Each woman has a problem with their love life and the other women in their circle help them along. Beautiful actors, great music and warm tones make this movie great to watch.

This film is so incredible that there are barely words to express the admiration and amazement which any sensitive person must experience upon seeing it. There are so many remarkable things about it. First of all, it is the first and only film directed by the beautiful young Lebanese actress Nadine Labaki, and yet she has the sure touch of a master, as if she had been making films like this for fifty years. Everything appears entirely effortless and natural, not like a 'film' at all, but like the spontaneous happenings of life itself. It flows like water, sparkling, darkening, then sparkling again. Apart from Labaki, who plays a lead character, no one in the film had ever acted before. They are all ordinary people, some of them actually picked up in the street! And yet, their performances are perfect, as if they had all won plenty of Oscars before and were all old pros. The film is made without any English-speaking influence at all, and is entirely influenced by French film-making style. There is a great deal of improvisation and a loose, natural structure. But Nadine Labaki is such a genius that she has out-done the French at their own game, and frankly, she could now go to Paris and tell them all how it should really be done. She must have been born a master, like Mozart. This is the ultimate nouvelle vague film, and Godard never even came close to this kind of total spontaneity and sense of truth. There is a touch of the anguished desperation of Agnes Varda, of the devil-may-care lightness tinged with melancholy of Julie Delpy, of the harrowed intensity of Agniezka Holland, and it is all profoundly feminine. Men barely figure in the film, which is about five Lebanese women who work in a beauty salon owned by one of them (Labaki). In this sanctum sanctorum, where men rarely enter, the secrets of the inner lives of the women are shared, not necessarily by discussion, but by osmosis. The 'caramel' of the title is literally the caramel made by boiling sugar, lemon juice and water to make caramel candy. It is used in Beirut to do the waxing on women's legs, but plenty gets eaten before they get to work. Waxing with caramel is a kind of purely female bonding ritual in Lebanese families, Labaki explains in a fascinating and lengthy interview which is an extra to the DVD, and which everybody ought to watch. One hopes that Labaki will get lots of work in Paris now, where they should all bow down and kiss the nether hems of her garments, and be quick about it, as she has surpassed them all with her first effort. However, as Labaki dedicates her film at the end 'a mon Beyrouth' ('to my Beirut'), she may be too attached to the place to leave. She admits to having lived with her parents as a young adult until her marriage and to being integrated into her community in a way difficult for Westerners to comprehend. The women in the salon are a mixture of Christian and Muslim, wholly indifferent to any barriers of religion, and cosmopolitan in their manners as only the women of Lebanon can be in the 'Arab world'. They are as far from the black crows of oppressed Saudi Arabia as day is from night. But that does not mean that they are liberated inside. As Labaki says, all Beirut women feel an undefined sense of guilt every day, they don't know for what, and none of them is really sure of who she is or who she should be. There are so many spectacular performances in this amazing film that it would be pointless to name them, as they are all so brilliant, and no one is even vaguely inferior to anyone else. It is the most perfectly matched ensemble I have ever seen. A great deal of the credit for this spectacular achievement is due to the French producer Anne-Dominique Toussaint, who was executive producer of the amazing 'Mina Tannenbaum' in 1994 and co-producer of Deneuve's 'Place Vendome' in 1998, to name two which are well known around the world. If it were not for Toussaint, Labaki would not have been given her chance. The film has excellent music by Khaled Mouzzanar, whom Labaki married in 2007, perhaps because she liked the sound of his music so much that she decided they may as well make some together. This film is extremely daring in terms of an Arab country, or even a Maronite one, as it deals with themes which include adultery and lesbianism and the double lives lived by Lebanese women who are liberated when alone but conventional when with their families, so that they are not sure which is really 'them'. They stand with one foot in the Stone Age and one foot in the future, which can be leg-splitting. Gisele Aouad, Sihame Haddad, Dimitri Staneofski, and Aziza Semaan all bring their own special pathos to the problems of getting old. The sad story of 'Tante Rose', played by Sihame Haddad, is heart-breaking, and is portrayed with such infinite delicacy that the actress could be described as a spiritual lace-maker. Aziza Semaan, as her much older sister Lili, who has dementia, is both hilarious and tragic at the same time, and one of the wildest and most breathtaking performances filmed in years. She is the one of whom Labaki says: 'I turned round in the street and saw her and I asked her if she would be willing to be in a film.' It took a year to piece together the cast off the street like this. Not since Carl Dreyer cast his silent film 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' with strangers whose faces he liked, has anything like that been pulled off so well. Everything about this film is sheer genius.

The ammunition is there: a 'sweet' film revolving around several young to middle aged women living their lives, warts 'n' all, in a film entitled 'Caramel'. The dismissive headlines labelling the film syrupy and sugar coated just write themselves. How pleasing then, that the film is anything but; and acts as a stark eye-opener that films of this ilk can come from certain parts of the world that are war torn and less than brimming with a rich and popular film industry. In fact, Lebanese film Caramel practically shelves the idea of a war-torn nation and instead delves deep inside the nation with the city of Beruit specifically cut open, laying bare the people within it. And not just any people; five or so women of varying ages with varying problems and facing varying situations. How refreshing that the film prefers to detail woman-hood in this secluded and prior to this film, shut off designated region.The first thing that strikes me after some further research is just how inexperienced the cast is. Perhaps this was deliberate from female director Nadine Labaki, who herself stars in the film. Perhaps she is aiming for one of those ultra-realistic portrayals of life within by enlisting nobody actors essentially hired to play themselves as women of the nation, age and consequently generation that they are. The women in question are Layale (Labaki), who works in a beauty salon along with two other women, Nisrine (Al Masri) and Rima (Moukarzel). The situations each respective women face are that Layale is stuck in a dead-end relationship with a married man; Nisrine has already slept with a man but is set to be married within the Arab world, in which pre-marital sex is not accepted while Rima is finding herself more and more attracted to women.What I find quite fitting given these characters and the consequent breaking down of imagery is the fact that early on, one character looks at themselves in a mirror within the beauty parlour, and makes a fuss over how 'pretty' she's supposed to look. It's this recognition of what people are 'supposed' to be or how the world demands they look when, in actual fact, free choice and individuality should rule over anything else. We are, after all, looking at characters who are either: attracted to the same gender as they are; have gone against ancient tradition by having sex before marriage with the other one daring to threaten already established relationships by being attracted to another married man.So the study, and the identification of it, is put across very early on and in sly, rather comic fashion. From here, the film branches out into what is essentially a brooding drama with subtle hints of romance. This is no definitive genre piece with a specific arc, more a statement or a documentation of lives lived in a specific place by those whom should know what it's like to live them. The sense of authority is most definitely prominent. A policeman gives someone a parking ticket, but is challenged and struggles somewhat by the woman that does so; someone else is pulled over for not wearing a seat-belt and two people are arrested for sitting in a car talking to one another. Two things crop up here: firstly, the director's sense that this is a minute study of a specific subject and the sense that everything comes under the light for examination, even the smallest things as would-be contemporary women living in Lebanon are broken down. Secondly, the sense of a dominant force – a presence that will clamp down on you in this life if you so much as ever so slightly slip up.But director Nadine Labaki is so assured of her subject matter and her overall project, she sprinkles in supporting characters in the shape of Jamale (Aouad), a regular customer at the salon who dreams of being an actress as well as Rose (Haddad), a tailor with a shop next to the salon, who is an old woman that has devoted her life to taking care of her mentally unbalanced older sister Lili (Semaan). These characters are developed to their own degree, Lili and Rose in particular acting as members of an 'older guard', or generation gone by now practically restricted to their indoor place of work, as they meet and greet a Frenchman that frequents their place of business on a regular basis.Layal, throughout this film, practically looks like Penelope Cruz's character out of 2006 effort Volver; a film that Caramel shares themes and ideas with. She hits upon the idea of using actual caramel as a wax; as a means of stripping away what is required. It is, indeed, the title of the film and acts somewhat neatly as the analogy for the film. That is, that the caramel is used to strip away certain things and the 'Caramel' that is the film acts as a stripping away of layers allowing us to look at contemporary Lebanese women. Caramel is an observed film; a film that creeps up on you in its study and leaves a nicely nourished feeling afterwards.

I watched this movie today and I can say I am a bit disappointed. Don't get me wrong, the movie wasn't bad in general, but I was expecting more. It's the hype, again...Coming from Greece, I can say that I found the situation described in the movie pretty familiar and that's another excuse for my low vote (7/10).It's like an hour since I saw the movie and if you I had to say three things about the movie I'd say "Habibi" (the Arabic word for "love", I think), "Lili" and "Oh my, Nadine's eyes are so stunning".All in all, it's a good way to spent some time.