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'Caramel'

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BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

February 1, 2008

Another beauty salon comedy? Yes and no. This affecting ensemble piece from Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki foams over with the scissor-sisters spirit of a "Beauty Shop" or "Steel Magnolias," but it eschews the easy wisecrack for authentically inhabited characters.

The strikingly beautiful Labaki plays Layale, a salon proprietor trapped in a dead-end relationship with a married man. While Layale spins her wheels, a Muslim colleague frets about her fiancee discovering she's not a virgin, and another sits on her taboo yearnings for a woman client. Among the shop's comers-and-goers, the spinster seamstress Aunt Rose sacrifices her romantic life to care for a senile sister, and an actress struggles with the travails of aging.

All of Labaki's characters, women and men, wrestle with sex-role pressures imposed by a tradition-bound culture. "Caramel," which takes its name from the melted-sugar concoction Layale uses for body waxing, portrays the various ways in which these people accommodate themselves to societal strait jackets. A sleeper hit at last year's Cannes Festival, it is a film of abundant heart and exquisite faces. Astonishingly, Labaki has assembled her soulful cast entirely from non-professionals. Hollywood casting agents should catch the next plane to Beirut.

CARAMEL (PG). 1:35 (thematic elements involving sexuality, language and some smoking). In Arabic and French with subtitles. At Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, Angelika Film Center, Manhattan.