Word: caramel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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With the most options, appetizers here include a salad of roasted beets with a goat cheese fondue, and Vietnamese crispy fried squid. Entrées include grilled beef hanger steak with shallot rings and grilled portabella mushrooms, crispy pressed half duck, with grilled proscuitto and stuffed dried apricots. Caramel mousse cake tops it all off. Usual price: $47. Savings...
...Caramel...
Except for one thing: Caramel is set in Beirut, where its leading characters speak either Arabic or French and never speak of the terrible torments visited upon Lebanon by its recent, tragic history. The director, co-writer and star of the film, Nadine Labaki (she's the shop's owner) dedicates the film to "My" Beirut and she presents the city as unscarred by warfare and looking, frankly, rather chic - an up-and-coming Third World capital, which, of course, it once was before it was gripped by religio-ideological terror...
...seem to me a huge defect. For one thing, even when people live under the worst forms of totalitarianism, ordinary life somehow proceeds. They get married, they have babies, they work at their jobs, they grouse about the nutsy behavior of their friends and relatives. But perhaps more important, Caramel (the title derives from the name of the preparation used for leg-waxing in the salon) testifies to the power of American popular culture at least briefly to override the endless traumas of our ever-more-violent political lives. Even Anne Frank filled a scrapbook with pictures of movie stars...
...that Caramel is dopy. It may be a first film, but Labaki, employing a cast that is full of non-professional actresses, is a slick and knowing filmmaker. Her multiple plot lines are neatly braided and though her characters are conventionalized they are also charming and capable of surprising us. I suppose, in the end, you'd have to say that her film is no big deal - just another good-looking, gently humorous, pleasantly romanticized little comedy, which ends with everyone a little wiser than they began. But that reckons without the unique circumstances of its making and its implicit...