In Beirut, six women and six stories meet around a women's beauty parlour: Layale, in love with a married man who will never leave his wife for her, Nisrine, who is going to get married and doesn't know how to tell his boyfriend she is no longer virgin, Rima, who doesn't accept to be attracted by women, Jamale, obsessed by age and physical appearance and Rose, who has sacrificed the best years of her life to look after her sister. Inside the hot, colourful and magnetic atmosphere of the old-fashioned beauty parlour, between brush strokes and caramel wax we hear them speaking about sex, love, maternity, with the freedom and intimacy that only women can show.
The result is a delicate fresco on women, capable of getting straightforwardly to the heart of women, but not only. A very delicate, never vulgar watercolour, depicting women involved in what seem to be out of time female problems and concerns. A fresco which also deals with hot topical issues, such as war, the living together between Catholics and Muslims, the clash of different cultures, but never losing its amusing and amused tone. In the end, we are both stunned and comforted by the strength that only women can show when they join together and problems are to be faced.
The director and actress Nadine Labaki manages to render the female daily melancholy, without ever falling into the banal or the cliché, but through a powerful and intense synaesthetic strategy: through eyes, smells, sounds, in such a poignant way, as to make us able to touch, to smell, to taste what is being performed, as if we were absorbed in that same intense atmosphere. A word must be spent for the soundtrack, well and wisely dosed, and never boring. A feel-good and intelligent movie I would suggest to all women, and, why not, also to men.
