Starring Nadine Labaki and Yasmine Al Masri. In French and Arabic with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, March 14, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

True to its title, Caramel at first seems like it will be cloyingly sweet. But the sticky substance also has a painful side in Lebanese culture: as we see again and again in the salon at the centre of Nadine Labaki’s sumptuous first film, the hot goop is used to rip out unwanted hair on clients’ legs and faces.

It’s fitting, then, that Caramel ends up having an edge to it. That undercurrent would be unexpected in a chick flick that focuses on women in a hairdressing shop, except for one thing: this romantic comedy is set in a country torn by religious and political torment. Not that any of that is taken head-on in this story of five women who meet in a salon called Si Belle; about the only indication we get of war is the odd power outage. Instead, they gab about their various relationship foibles, from salon owner Layale’s (Labaki) pointless affair with a happily married man to Nisrine’s (Yasmine Al Masri) panic that her Muslim fiancé will find out she’s not a virgin. The situations may sound straight out of Steel Magnolias, but they’re complicated by their setting. This is a society where women can wear sexy spaghetti-strap dresses but struggle under oppressive traditions. It’s a place where you can’t book a hotel room unless you can prove you’re either married or a whore; where you might even have to consider surgery to restore your virginity.

The look of the film also blends conflicting moods. On one hand, it’s a gaudy comedy of overstuffed scenes, with the salon itself bursting with ultrasuede loungers, old-style conical hairdryers, and artificial flowers. Outside its doors are loving images of Beirut’s faded glory, with golden light falling on pockmarked plaster buildings.

Labaki presents it all with heart—the garish excess and the faded regal beauty, the old ways colliding with the new, the sweet mixing with the painful—then sums it up in her postscript, which simply reads “To my Beirut.”