ONE of the unexpected treats to emerge from last year’s London Film Festival (2007) was the feature film debut of former music video director Nadine Labaki, Caramel.

The film follows the fortunes of five women working in a Lebanese beauty salon and eschews the politics of the region for a more personal look at the people involved.

Hence, it’s by turns romantic, amusing, articulate and sweet-natured and an easy crowd-pleaser for anyone looking for a divering couple of hours in the cinema.

The director herself plays Layale, a woman who finds herself in the death-throes of a failing relationship with a married man, who remains blissfully unaware that love could be waiting just around the corner, in the form of a smitten local policeman and traffic warden.

Her colleagues, meanwhile, face their own dilemmas: Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri) is desperate to prevent her fiancé from finding out that she’s not a virgin on their wedding night, while Rima (Joanna Moukarzel) finds herself hopelessly attracted to a female client.

Commenting on the London Film Festival website last year, Ali Jaafar credited writer-director and star Labaki with “drawing together a beguiling tapestry of life in modern-day Beirut and all its contradictions, as Christian and Muslim, young and old, religious and secular, all live and work side by side”.

He added: “Labaki’s first foray into feature filmmaking heralds the arrival of a genuine talent, displaying an impressive ability to draw laughter and tears with equal proficiency.”

The film’s title is derived from the homemade caramel used to wax its clients’ legs, for those that were curious. It was also Lebanon’s official submission to the Best Foreign Language Film Category of the 80th Annual Academy Awards

Caramel opens in UK cinemas on May 16, 2008 and is a certificte PG.

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