Caramel

Caramel director Nadine Labaki, with the film's poster.

Caramel, a Lebanese film by Nadine Labaki, follows an incredible group of Beirut women through a warm and convincing narrative. Three young women work in a salon in a mixed, middle-class neighborhood of Beirut, where their love lives take center stage. Having just read Hall’s lengthy exploration of theories of representation, it is helpful to look at Caramel through a more critical eye.

Constructionist theories claims that meaning is constructed through language; things don’t mean, rather, we construct meaning through our language system. The scene that I have chosen to look at through this lens is the scene where the three young women and their older friend, Jamal, an aging actress, are taking a cab to a dr.’s office. Nisrine, a Muslim woman about to get married, is withholding a secret from her fiancé: she is not a virgin. The cab ride scene, without sound, would seem vivacious and bubbly, like many other scenes in the film; the girls are laughing, smiling. However, through their conversation we learn that they are on their way to a dr. to perform a procedure that will “make her a virgin” again, a customary requirement for Muslim women before marriage.

Through a constructionist theory, we see that the material world (4 outgoing women in a taxicab) does not construct any meaning. The language system, the conversation they are having about what fake name to assign Nisrine in the dr.’s office, is what gives the scene meaning. Constructionists say the meaning is a cultural construction; the fact that the women need to come up with a fake name is entirely a cultural concept. In a society, particularly for Muslim Nisrine, where modesty and propriety are valued almost above all-else, the women may seem to be jovial; really they are dealing with an intensely controversial issue in Lebanese society: sexuality before marriage.

Nisrine asserts that she wants a French name (which Layale teases her about because she can’t speak French). Nisrine is darker-skinned than the other women, who are Christian, not Muslim. The cultural meaning behind these social cues are without meaning if we ignore the language system. The constructionist representation theory gives insight to these hidden layers, meaningless without a constructed language system.