If your instinct warns against a comedy about female friendship with such a sugary title, don’t listen. This is a lovely film about the comings and goings of Beirut hairdressers.
The caramel is not for eating, but a weapon in the beauty arsenal — used for sugar waxing. More or less women-only (bar a lovestruck policeman), we might be in an Almodóvar film but for the want of melodrama or a transvestite.
Instead, pleasures come small. One of the hairdressers, the film’s writer-director Nadine Labaki, is obsessed with meeting her married boyfriend’s wife.
Sweetest of all is the love story between a seamstress, who has never married, and the sister with learning difficulties she has sacrificed it all to look after.
What it’s not, resolutely, is a film about politics. Caramel is a love letter to a beleaguered city — ‘To my Beirut” is the dedication on the end credits. — Cath Clarke