Nadine Labaki's Caramel: The Simultaneously Personal and Impersonal Nature of the Female Experience.

I had originally watched Nadine Labaki’s 2007 film Caramel four years ago when I was only fifteen years old. Being the very girly and make-up obsessed teenage girl I was (and still am), I was left struck by the beauty, intricacy and intensity of the women’s eyeshadow, concluding my viewing of the film with serious cosmetic ambitions for the following school day rather than a lingering and thought provoking impression of the female experience. I blame my naive and superficial interpretation of Caramel at the time on my lack of acquaintance with womanhood, which now at eighteen, I would argue I have greater exposure to. I was reminded of the existence of this delicate yet piercing cinematic piece during a visit to a DVD store, and upon my second viewing of the film I finally grasped its social ambitions and ruminative qualities. Prompting me to reevaluate the insouciance I pride myself in having and realising that at the core of the female experience lies the overpowering preoccupation of appealing to others rather than ourselves. Apart from the existentialist reverberations the film left me with, I once again had the perfect make-up look in mind for my night ahead. 

Set in twenty-first century Beirut within a local beauty parlour, Caramel peeks into the tumultuous lives of its five female leads, each of whom grapple with onerous personal matters. However, the women’s unity is founded in their mutual entanglement with romance, family relationships and the expectation to abide by the authority in their lives. The Li Belle salon in Caramel serves as an “escape from the pressures of” the traditionalist social sphere the women inhabit, a space in which they can unapologetically confide in each other without being subject to scrutiny, establishing their world outside of the salon as being burdensome and exclusionary. By oscillating between the depiction of the women’s lives inside and outside the parlour, Labaki sheds light on the oppressive social standards imposed onto women by members of their wider community, assigning her film the dual purpose of making her female audience feel heard whilst urging all her spectators to slacken the demands we unconsciously and innately place on women. 

Caramel’s central feminist message is set forth early on in the film during the scene in which Layal is stopped by a neighbourhood police officer, Youssef, for not wearing a seatbelt whilst driving. Their interaction begins with him stating that she would ‘look prettier with the seatbelt on’, taking advantage of his leveraged social standing by reducing her to an object of desire who is expected to submit to him. Layal’s belittlement and treatment as a spectacle is reinforced when considering the sequence’s mise en scene and cinematography. Throughout the entire duration of their exchange, Layal is filmed in a close up shot within her car, the proximity between her and the camera allows for her made up face and styled hair to be the image’s focal point. Labaki’s choice of framing can be interpreted as a nod to Laura Mulvey’s concept of “fetishistic scopophilia”, which displays the female subject in “fragmented close ups” that intend to overvalue her beauty and reduce the threat she would pose to male spectators as a full-fledged being. Contrastingly, Youssef is captured in a medium close up, including more of his upper body within the shot. Despite the minimal difference in their cinematic rendering, the wider framing with which Labaki shoots Youssef assigns him greater agency in Caramel’s narrative and its social context due to the reduced focus placed on his looks. To fortify the gendered differences encoded into this scene, Labaki sets Layal within her car where she speaks to Youssef through the vehicle’s window. The window’s visual prominence in Layal’s shots serves to symbolically highlight the “to-be-looked-at-ness” Youssef perceives her with, as ultimately windows are objects associated with scopophilic tendencies. Additionally, when Layal gives into Youssef’s demands and puts her seatbelt on, she announces that it ‘suffocates’ her. As the use of the mise en scene piece is enforced onto her by Youssef, it becomes an emblem of the confinement and smothering Layal feels when under the pressure’s of her male-dominated social-sphere, clearly referencing Caramel’s thematic motif. 

Layal’s efforts in adhering to the expectations put on her by the men in her life are also formally delineated in the segment of the film in which she fraudulently tries to book a hotel for her and her married lover by claiming to be his wife. Throughout her multiple attempts, Layal is dressed in white, grey and black, with her shoulders, arms and thighs covered, a striking difference from the vibrant and revealing outfits she was seen wearing in previous scenes. By having her character take on a more modest way of dressing whilst trying to pass as her lover’s wife, Labaki sheds light on the archaic prospect that once a woman marries she is to abandon her unique identity so as to focus solely on her role as a wife and inadvertently be cast in her husband’s shadow. A secondary reading can also be extrapolated from Layal’s drastic change in costuming, one that provides her with greater interiority and once again circles back to Caramel’s social intention. Putting Layal in muted colours whilst having her play into the idealised image of a wife, essentially mirrors the dullness she feels when needing to appeal to men, visually simplifying and emotively communicating the anonymity women experience in conservative and chauvinistic environments. With this efficiently constructed scene, Labaki fundamentally advocates for a change in gender relations by stylistically portraying the depleting consequences of the social, personal and behavioural barriers placed on a woman’s existence. 

Another stylistically and metaphorically charged scene takes place in the midst of the film, and sees Jamele during one of her many chaotic auditions. Doomed from the start, a caked Jamele begins by holding her name card upside down. What may seem like a careless mistake in the film’s narrative, can actually be explicated to reveal a social meaning, one that is cohesive with Labaki’s thematic agenda. Jamele, being the eldest of the group of women that dominate Caramel’s filmic world, frequently visits the salon with the hopes of looking younger and consequently more appealing to the casting directors she auditions for. Her multiple attempts at chasing a youthful image establish Jamele as the more self-conscious and obsequious of the bunch, hence the misplacement of her name card at her audition reflects the convoluted state of her sense of self, as in order to stay working she must channel and maintain a persona unnatural to her. Jamele’s characterisation is strengthened when considering the scene’s mise en scene, especially the make-up look Labaki devises for her. In an attempt to distract from her mature age, Jamele adorns a heavy layer of face makeup that visibly creases at her smile lines, this is coupled with a dark and dramatic eye look and a bold red lip. The quantity and extravagance of Jamale’s make up causes it to appear almost mask-like (note the face tape that starts peeling off on the side of her face), once again expressing her inability to accept her age and her need to feign a guise for the sake of her potential employers. Through this tense scene, Labaki powerfully illustrates how the societal stress placed on women’s image and behaviour does not only restrain the relationships within their inner circle but can also transcend to their careers, showing the inescapability and claustrophobia propagated by gendered prejudice. 

To reiterate and hence substantiate the interpretation given to Labaki’s choice of framing during Layal and Youssef’s first encounter, Labaki arguably applies corresponding film theory to the cinematography of the film’s final scene. Caramel’s denouement captures Siham, a regular customer at the Li Belle salon, cheerfully pacing down a street with her newly short hair, which she previously refrained from cutting so as to not displease her husband. To film this ending sequence, Labaki initially employs a wide shot, displaying Siham in her entirety. Despite her change in hairstyle being the emphasis of this scene, Labaki’s decision to stray away from giving it enhanced visual importance signifies that it is not her aesthetic transformation to be attributed to her happiness but the act of having disobeyed her husband and fulfilled her own desire instead. By doing so, she feels satisfied, independent and therefore whole, and Labaki expresses Siham’s proud and formed identity through the encompassing shot size. Even when shooting Siham “giddily admiring” her reflection in a shop window, Labaki selects a medium shot frame to insinuate that the subject proudly gleams not only at her freshly styled look but at her provocative self who radically put her own desire above her husband’s; marking a fortification in her identity, illustrated by cinematically rendering more of her upper body rather than just her face. 

It would not be a holistic reading of this film without recognizing the tenderness and open-mindedness of Labaki’s directorial debut. As much as the film is centred around angering gender issues, Labaki accompanies Caramel’s core of feminine struggle with scenes that perfectly encompass the intimacy, strength and support within the women’s relationship. The women’s mutual understanding for each other’s turmoil is what constitutes the solid foundation of their friendship, permitting Labaki to express the beauty and profoundness of being a woman. Labaki uses the symbol of the sweet and decadent caramel, which is used for waxing, to represent the duality and bittersweetness of femininity, reminding viewers that there is pain involved in the feminine experience, pain that is encountered frequently and pain who’s endurance is unfortunately necessary to realise an image deemed acceptable and respectable by a woman’s wider society. 

Filmography:

1. Caramel (Nadine Labaki, 2007).

Works Cited:

1. Chilingerian, Jillian. “Caramel: Using the Patriarchy to Explore Female Identity in the Public and Private Spheres: Review.” In Their Own League. October 3, 2021. https://intheirownleague.com/2021/10/03/caramel-using-the-patriarchy-to-explore-female-identity-in-the-public-and-private-spheres-review/. 

2. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6-18. 

3. Calderaro, Marc. “Caramel (Sukkar Banat).” Pop Matters. July 1, 2008. https://www.popmatters.com/caramel-sukkar-banat1-2496140123.html.