Caramel: Beirut from a female perspective
The pre-Christmas weekend naturally sports a wealth of offers: for the youngest audiences there’s Bee Movie (Universal, approximately 450 screens) while for adolescents Walt Disney is releasing National Treasure.
Other US titles out are Lions for Lambs by Robert Redford (Fox, 145 screens) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Andrew Dominik (Warner, 80 prints), as well as the American-produced Love in the Time of Cholera by British director Mike Newell and featuring a European cast (Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Javier Bardem).
Cineuropa recommends a jewel of a film distributed in Italy on 30 screens by LadyBlu: Caramel [+see also:
trailer
film profile], selected in this year’s Directors Fortnight at Cannes and a hit with audiences in France (over 500,000 admissions).
The film by debut Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki (who also stars) – which between January and April 2008 will be released in Holland, Spain, the UK and Germany – was produced by Anne-Dominique Toussaint (per Les Films des Tournelles), the French co-producer of Respiro: Grazia’s Island [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Emanuele Crialese. Toussaint was struck by the grace of this story of women torn between the East and the West, set in Beirut amid passionate love affairs, homosexuality and surgeries for restoring virginity.
"Today, Lebanon seems like an country that is open and free, with an emancipated society. But this is not always the case", said Labaki after the film’s press screening in Rome. "Behind the facade, women are still bound my many things, by the continuous fear of other people’s judgment. Thus, Lebanese women are consumed by feelings of guilt and remorse. My heroines feel safe in the beauty salon in which the film is set. It is a place in which they never feel judged, even when talking about intimate and private issues".
As for the choice of using non-professional actors, the director said: "I wanted women who in real life were like their characters. I had a very specific idea about their physical make-up, their personalities, the words they uses, and I didn’t look for characters. Instead, I had to look on the streets, in shops, in friends’ homes…”.
(Translated from Italian)
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