The Intimate World of Caramel

Nadine Labaki’s Caramel explores Beirut through the lives of five women, who, in the shared space and community of a beauty salon Si Belle, come to confront their personal problems and navigate their identities in a society that may be modern, yet is often at odds with women’s personal freedom. In Labaki’s film, the use of non-actors, coupled with the intimate role of the camera in framing cinematic space, allows for greater identification with the protagonists on part of the viewer, enhancing the feeling that the film could essentially be representing the real lives of contemporary Lebanese women.

By frequently filming interior spaces, with shots from behind windows, in mirrors, or in doorways, Labaki adds to a sense of intimacy in the onscreen world. Even when the subject is male, he is filmed just as the women are, purporting that though all her characters live their lives freely, they are restricted by social constructs of gender and war. For example, there is a scene where the police officer who admires Layale imagines a conversation with her, as he watches her speak on the phone across the street and through a window. The audience sees the male police become human and vulnerable. Additionally, even alien spaces are transformed into personal ones by the characters, namely the hotel room Layale rents, thoroughly cleans, and later becomes the site where the friends reveal their deepest insecurities. This transformation ties into ideas delineated by Khatib, who expresses that in Arab cinema, feminine space is often used as a resistance to its oppressor. The space is protected by the women, and that is something Labaki believes would bring about positive change in Lebanon (Silverstein).

With her realistic portrayal of the lives of normal in Lebanon, Nadine Labaki challenges the tropes of popular film. Borrowing concepts from Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” it is useful to consider how Labaki resists the dominant trope in popular film that privileges a sense of “scopophilia,” or the pleasure of looking, over the actual content of shots, especially when women are involved. Essentially, Mulvey’s essay details how the gaze of the camera in cinema typically performs two functions for the viewer: one is the function of identification, whereby the viewer is made to feel with the protagonist, while the other is non-diegetic and scopophilic, with characters framed solely for the exciting potential of their appearance.

While not explicitly situated against this pattern of viewing, it is interesting that Labaki’s film nonetheless manages to overturn these tropes in practice. While each of the characters’ stories deals with the social position of women, the central aspect of the film is not cultural critique as much as it is cultural exposition. Not only is this a form of self-censorship (Asfour), but by focusing on the lives of these women, and only indirectly on the social context, Labaki allows the viewer to identify with the women onscreen as subjects and not as objects. This a common theme in Labaki’s work (Labaki).

Labaki foregrounds women in her film, showing mainly their interactions in order to explore her society from a different angle than it is typically portrayed. This, together with her carefully planned shots, creates an intimate space that encourages the viewer to become emotionally invested in the problems the Lebanese people face.

By Nicolas Reed and Carolina Beguiristain

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Works Cited

Asfour, Nana. ““Where Do We Go Now?” Asks Nadine Labaki.” The New Yorker. The New

Yorker, 25 Mar. 2012. Web. 09 Nov. 2014.

Dawson, Nick. “Nadine Labaki, Caramel.” Filmmaker Magazine Nadine Labaki Caramel

Comments. Filmmaker Magazine, 1 Feb. 2008. Web. 09 Nov. 2014.

“Interview with Nadine Labaki – Director of Where Do We Go Now?” Interview by Melissa

Silverstein. Women and Hollywood. Indiewire, 13 Sept. 2011. Web. 02 Nov. 2014.

Khatib, Lina. Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the

Arab World. London: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2006. Print.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18.

Print.

“Nadine Labaki Interview.” YouTube. Columbia College Chicago, 17 May 2012. Web. 29 Oct.

2014.

Shafik, Viola. Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity. 2nd ed. Cairo and New York, NY:

American University in Cairo, 2007. p. 244. Print.

Nights of Change

The Nights of the Jackal, directed by Abdulatif Abdulhamid, takes place in Syria during the outbreak of the Six-Day war. Abdulhamid uses the main character Kamel’s series of failures to his peasant family to show that the conflict between Palestine and Israel has served to disenfranchise the patriarch and westernize Syria.

The first patriarchal duty that Kamel fails at is raising his own children, as most of them turn out to disgrace the family in some way. The first disgrace occurs when Kamel visits his oldest Westernized son studying in the city. He lives in squalor, has dropped out of school, and wastes the family’s money on cologne and underwear. Following that, the middle son shames his family by flirting with a married woman. Next, the youngest daughter elopes, pregnant, with their neighbor. Finally, Kamel’s youngest son and only family left by the end of the film leaves home, preferring to fend for himself than with his father. All of these actions ignore Kamel’s authority over the family and therefore strip him of his dignity. They are also pretty “western” and therefore convey that the Westernization of Syria is causing much change within traditional family structures.

Additional failures include the planting of the tomatoes, which turn out to be worthless after the prices fall due to the socialist, inept Syrian government. Another is Kamel’s short volunteering time for the military, from which is he dismissed. Kamel’s strong support for the Palestinian cause is common in Syria, where the “commitment … to the cause has been used by the regime of Hafiz al-Assad … as a means of political legitimization” (Shafik, 155). Like the Syrian government, Kamel used the Palestinian cause as a way to validate himself as a man. That, however, failed.

The final and arguably most important failure of Kamel is his inability to whistle and scare off the jackals that threaten his home. This motif repeats throughout the film, as Kamel can do nothing but rely on his wife; the only one capable of producing the piercing whistle. This undermines his authority. In the opening scene of the movie, Kamel violently shakes her awake and forces her to whistle to stop the jackals’ cries. When he does this, she laments, “Who is the man of this house? Me, or you?” Kamel’s frustration and inadequacy satirizes the situation in Syria as it simultaneously comments on how restricted Syrians feel. This film is an example of one that “lets out air,” a Syrian term that describes how politically critical movies serve to allow people to vent (Wedeen, 104). Another significant implication of the involuntary struggle between Kamel and Um Kamel is the liberation of women. “The liberation of women is firmly connected with the liberation of the land” (Khatib, 92).

The Nights of the Jackal deals with the modernization of Syria by showing its direct effect on the Kamel family. It shows how the patriarchy still exists, but “has been gilded and disguised” (Ferena, 141). It also criticizes the war and its effects on the people.

Works Cited

Ferena, R. “Gender, sexuality and patriarchy in modern Egypt.” Critique: Critical Middle

Eastern Studies, 2003. Print.

The Nights of the Jackal. Dir. Abdulatif Abdulhamid, 1989. DVD.

Shafik, Viola. Arab Cinema. Cairo: The American University, 2007. Print.

Khatib, Lina. Filming the Modern Middle East. New York: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2006. Print.

Wedeen, Lisa. Film in the Middle East and North Africa. University of Texas Press, 2011. Print.