Touches You

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

A thoroughly charming and engaging slice of life from Lebanon. This is truly a unique and wondrous foreign film, romanticizing an exotic land which is often negatively depicted. Director/actress Labaki zones in on the human side here, reminding us that such universal issues as marriage, sexuality, and relationship anxiety are relevant everywhere.Labaki has great screen presence and crafts a tragicomic fable about female relationships. She beautifully elicits natural performances from her non-professional actors and delivers a believable and appealing portrayal herself.This is definitely a must watch for fans of not just foreign films but of enchanting, whimsical cinematic treasures in general. Love it!!!

I get a distinct impression from reviews I've read that most, if not all were written by women and that 'Caramel' is generally seen as a movie for the 'girls'....I love my World cinema and will watch almost anything, so when it came up on BBC2 recently, I recorded it on my provider's box without knowing much about it. And, yes, like the confectionery in the title, it is soft centred and a bit gooey and whilst I (obviously) didn't appreciate all the finer points of the treatments available at the salon, I could appreciate the warmth and camaraderie of the five women.Beirut and Lebanon usually conjure up either actual or imagined images of war, conflict and heavy oppression of women. Here, director (& lead actress) Nadine Labaki serves us up a candy bar that's full of wholesome goodness, quite a lot of sweetness but more importantly, a message to the west that women there think and wish and love like every other woman, anywhere. It's just circumstances that differ and those can have huge effects on people's lives.Whilst we generally see modern, beautiful and free-thinking women in the film, scenes that were still commonplace in the UK just 50-60 years ago, make us realise that there still are 'rules' in Arabic countries. I'm talking about sharing a double room in a hotel, which requires a marriage certificate and personal I.D. Also, at the beginning, a man and a woman just chatting in a car in the street at night is considered 'indecent' by the local police and they are asked to go indoors.I won't go into all the ins and outs of the various relationships, as it's the overall impression I want to give and whether the film is any good. The latter is partly answered by all the 5 and 4 star reviews already up and I'd have to agree. Even for a middle aged bloke like me, I can see enough human strands and their gentle effects on the nicely different lifestyles and circumstances to keep almost anyone interested. Whether your gung-ho action flick freak will, or not, is not one I'm not going to speculate on!

Caramel is a Lebanon-France Co-production with a charming story of female love, friendship and aging. The story focus on the love life of a group of young and middle-age women who work/visit a hair & beauty salon. The story breaks many stereotypes about religious confrontation in Lebanon and on how Middle Eastern Women think, feel or live.The movie mix romance, humor and sadness with simplicity, warmth, and heart under the fresh direction of young actress-director Nadine Labaki, who also plays the leading character.All the actors are terrific in their performances: Yasmine Elmasri as the modern and untraditional Muslim girl Nisrine, who is going to get married; Joanna Moukarzel as the boyish Lesbian Rima; Gisèle Aouad as the aging divorced actress Jamale who struggles with having to find a job in the modeling industry and move on with her life after her divorce; Nadine Labaki as Layale, a good-hearted girl who discovers her boyfriend is a married man; Adel Karam as the sweet policeman Youssef in love with Layale; Sihame Haddad as the patient and shy single tailor Rose, and Aziza Semaan as an impressive demented Lili.The face of Lebanon and Beirut shown is real and diverse, not stereotypical, despite showing Christians and Muslims, and different social groups. The Beirut we see is not the one under reconstruction, the post-war destroyed one, but the Beirut of the people who live in the city, the ones who make it a lovable place. We see real people who live their lives in their own way and faith and that intermingle without problems, a world in which Christianity and Islam and present in equal parts in their culture, people who struggle with the same issues that we Westerners do.The movie was shot in warm caramel tones, that goes well with title, which relates to the waxing system using home-made caramel that the beautician uses.The music, a warm and sentimental mix of French and Arabic songs is truly fantastic.A heart-warming enjoyable film that offers a real portrait of life in modern Beirut and Lebanese women told in an universal simple and touching language, with some soapy moments.

When a foreign film manages to make that break across the border and garner international success there's often the expectation that it should act as an ambassador for its country of origin, especially when that nation is not known for its prolific cinematic output. But where does that leave Nadine Labaki's Lebanese romance Caramel? Can any film successfully walk that balance between the light-hearted and the weighty? Caramel may flirt with the anachronistic studio-era concept of being a 'woman's picture' but when the only current offering for strong female leads in cinemas sees entire platoons of the Boots 'here come the girls' set marching blindly into cinemas to watch four over-paid harridans bemoaning the lack of haute couture in Abu Dhabi there has never been a better time to discover the mature and believable view of romance purported by Caramel. Who says rom coms have to be dumb screen fodder? JB