Review: Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Reviews

Caramel

Love, loniliness, aging, and bad hair

By PETER KEOUGH | February 6, 2008

2.5 Stars

CARAMEL: Yet another beauty salon as microcosm.

Why are beauty salons so popular all over the world as settings for microcosmic movies? In this confection by Nadine Labaki, who also stars, the establishment does business in a Beirut blissfully unscarred by decades of civil wars and invasions, a city where the main problems faced by its five female protagonists are the perennial woes of love, loneliness, aging, and bad hair. Layale (Labaki), the proprietor, is a good Catholic, but she’s 30 and having an affair with a married man. Working for her are Nisrine, whose fiancé doesn’t know she’s not a virgin, and Rima, who’s just finding out she’s a lesbian. Jamale comes in regularly to look younger for the acting auditions she always fails. And Rose the seamstress is really old. The title refers to the syrup used to wax clients’ legs. Like the movie, it’s really sweet, but, as in a hilarious scene in which Layale applies it to her unwitting rival, it can really sting. Arabic + French | 96 minutes | Kendall Square + West Newton

Related: Flashbacks: July 28, 2006, Good news, bad news, 5. Rod Blagojevich, More

Topics: Reviews , Entertainment, Culture and Lifestyle, Movies, More

| More

ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH

REVIEW: WHERE DO WE GO NOW? | May 22, 2012
Lebanese director Nadine Labaki's whimsical film about internecine slaughter has a tone problem from the very start: a group of widows engage in a goofy line dance while the voiceover narrator bewails the death toll of religious warfare.

REVIEW: MEN IN BLACK 3 | May 24, 2012
Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), a fifth dimensional alien, can see the infinite possibilities each moment possesses and the infinite contingencies that caused it to happen.

INTERVIEW: RICHARD LINKLATER MESSES WITH TEXAS IN BERNIE | May 16, 2012
No matter how far he strays, Richard Linklater's heart remains in Texas.

REVIEW: THE DICTATOR | May 16, 2012
Though his PR campaign might suggest otherwise, Sacha Baron Cohen has actually made (with director Larry Charles) a sweet movie, not unlike Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator , if less sentimental.

REVIEW: THE HUNTER | May 17, 2012
Apparently extinct since the 1930s, the Tasmanian Tiger resembled an uncanny assortment of mismatched parts from other animals. Daniel Nettheim's film is equally weird and motley.