Nadine Labaki

J Magazine meets the creative force behind Caramel, Lebanon’s most successful film ever
Text_Lucy Fielder

As a child during Lebanon’s civil war, director Nadine Labaki often had only one form of escapism: film.

“Most of the time we couldn’t go outside, we couldn’t play, and we couldn’t go to school because it was closed. Our only escape was watching movies on TV and fortunately we had a video rental shop beneath the house,” says the 34-year-old director, co-writer and star of Caramel. “I understood the only way to create different worlds was to be a filmmaker, so I decided to become one.”

Before starting work on Caramel, Labaki had already made her name in Lebanon as the director of award-winning pop videos; her work with pop songstress Nancy Ajram famously broke the Arab pop world’s flesh-revealing mould by showing the siren in woolly jumpers catching the bus and hanging the washing out.

A delightful film about women, relationships and hair removal, Caramel has been sold to more than 40 countries since charming crowds at Cannes. It was an art house hit in the United States earlier this year, and is currently pulling in punters throughout Europe. Labaki’s star continues to rise; she was recently named the world’s fifth most powerful Arab by Arabian Business and one of Variety magazine’s 10 directors to watch.

In spite of its creator’s experiences of violence as a child, Caramel distinguishes itself among Lebanese films by not touching on the civil war that once tore the country apart. It focuses instead on the lives of five women, one of them played by Labaki herself, who work at or frequent a Beirut beauty parlour. The film’s Arabic name, Sukkar Banat (ladies’ sugar) is a sugary concoction used at the salon to remove body hair. This focus on everyday life helped propel Caramel to success in Labaki’s war-weary home country, and spark the curiosity of cinemagoers worldwide who wanted to see what normal life in Lebanon is like.

“All people outside know about Lebanon is this was a country at war, full stop. So it was important for me to show the other side,” Labaki says, sipping Lebanese “white coffee” – hot water perfumed with orange flowers – as we chat at an Italian trattoria in Gemayze, a broad avenue of golden, sandstone buildings housing scores of restaurants. Most of Caramel was shot in this district. The front of the salon is a real-life 70s retro shop front, incongruous among the winding alleys and crumbling, sometimes bullet-pocked plasterwork facades. “I wanted to talk about the Lebanese people: their culture, their warmth, how they are on a good day,” Labaki tells me.

A week after Caramel finished shooting, in July 2006, war broke out. Labaki had been due to go to Paris to start editing, but felt compelled to stay. “You feel a sense of belonging, that you’d be betraying your country if you left while everything was on fire,” she recalls. The contrast between the gentle, warm-hued Beirut portrayed in Caramel and the reality of a city under siege and bombardment sowed doubts about the project. “Suddenly I didn’t know whether what I was saying made sense, or was helping my country, because I was talking about life, colours, women, but my country was at war,” she says. “But I knew that this was my mission, to show another side of Lebanon.”

Foreigners, she says, have often expressed surprise at the sunny, three-dimensional city shown in the film, with its graceful French colonial architecture, vibrancy and central knot of down-to-earth women with ordinary lives and everyday problems.

In July 2006, on the last night of filming, I was able to watch Labaki in action on “set”, which was in fact Beirut’s Sakanat El-Helou police station, where immaculate, fake police officers rubbed shoulders with crumpled real ones, who could barely conceal their pleasure at the interruption of the nightshift. With her enormous eyes and flowing black hair, Labaki added a touch of glamour to the drab surroundings in a borrowed police jacket and turned-up jeans.

She re-shot a scene from several angles while directing a cast composed entirely of untrained amateurs.

Although it was well past midnight, there was a mood of camaraderie and happy exhaustion in the air. “You should see the scenes when she’s both acting and directing,” French producer Anne-Dominique Toussaint whispered to me. “It’s really something, very hard to do and very professional.”

Caramel addresses a subject close to Labaki’s heart: the role of women in Lebanese society. Each character is tormented by a secret; Labaki’s character, for example, is having an affair with a married man. Her fellow beautician struggles silently with her feelings for other women, while another fears, with the approach of her wedding night, her fiancé’s discovery that he isn’t her first.

Ella Taylor, movie critic for New York’s Village Voice, wrote that Labaki’s film is “an astute commentary on the way Lebanese women sit uncomfortably in the crosshairs of their country’s clash between patriarchal tradition and Westernised modernity.” On this note, Labaki explains that “Lebanese women have an apparent freedom – they dress, work, and act the way they want. But underneath there is always this fear about what society thinks, this constant guilt.”

So the characters do not, as might be expected, gossip in their coffee breaks about their various issues. Their inner conflicts are revealed through a furtive phone call with a lover, a sudden disappearance on shift, or a nervous manner. “The women in the film steal their moments of happiness. They never live them openly,” Labaki says. “It was important for me to show this confusion we’ve been having, this quest for our own identity.”