Like its name, from the get go, Caramel really is a feast for the senses.  The continuous jangling of the lead character's bracelets, the bright and eclectic range of clothing styles of each of the leading ladies, the stickiness and associated pain of the caramel used for waxing in the  Beirut salon where most of the action takes place and of course the feelings of love, loss, loneliness, insecuirty and guilt experienced interchangeably by each of the characters.  All of this indeed provides an antithesis to the Beirut and Lebanon ordinarily imagined by the audience.

The film is perfectly cast, largely with unknown actors leaving the audience feeling a sense of affinity with each of the characters.  You really cannot help but like each of them, except of course the nasty and overzealous Lebanese policemen.  It is these portrayals of the Lebanese police that are perhaps the only connection or insight the film offers to the political problems  and sense of volatility that  must influence every day life in contemporary Lebanon.  Perhaps it was the director's intention to provide a window into Lebanese life different from most audience's imagininings of it as a country dominated by violence, dust and delapidated buildings.  Caramel's Lebanon is one of colour, diversity and people battling with everyday human conditions. 

The main narrative follows the leading character Layale's (the film's writer-director Nadine Labaki) affair with a married man. The film expertly covers the spectrum of emotions and actions that seem to characterise affairs of this kind - her attempts to stifle her absolute excitement for secretly rendezvousing with him, her gradual need/desire to do anything for his affirmation or a text message, her internal grappling with the morals of this age-old story, her obcession with his wife and then finally and thankfully from the audience's point of view her liberating realisations and self control.  This narrative is intersected with her colleague and friend's Nisrine's approaching wedding and ensuing guilt over having had intercourse with a man prior to her soon-to-be- Muslim husband.  It is this story that reminds the audience of the degree of inequality and unfair expectations that some Lebanese women face. Simultaneously we are intially amused by the desperate and ostentatious attempts of Jamale, the 'older' hairdresser to remain young.  Touchingly, however, this amusement turns to sadness as this she begins to fake her own menstrual cycle.  We are also intrigued by Rina, a perhaps less stereotypical hairdresser, exploring her sexuality through the sensual hair washing of one particular female customer. By the film's end it is the tranformation of this customer that seems to be symbolic of the pressures and restraints women face in Lebanon.  Finally we are left with the mad Lili and her carer Rose, the local seamstress. Rose's workshop and her relationship with Lili seems to provide a peep into a Lebanon past as well as creating a real sense of sadness as Rose is ultimately unable to detach herself from the dependent and mad Lili to get a hair cut and enjoy a night with a man.

Caramel's audience will not leave the cinema disappointed. On the contrary. Through its subtle and often humourous exploration of different human conditions and almost unconscious perspective of a more colourful, lively and feminine Lebanon the audience will leave felling refreshed and as though their senses have been awakened to something new.