One of five films nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at
this year’s Academy Awards, the Lebanese drama “Capernaum” is a sometimes
heavy-handed, but nonetheless powerful tale of poverty and adversity, written
and directed with unflinching naturalism by Nadine Labaki.
The film
opens as streetwise youth named Zain (Zain Al Rafeea)
is brought before a judge in a crowded Lebanese courtroom. He guesses that he’s
12, but is so frail he appears much younger. He’s been jailed for attempted
murder, but is now the plaintiff in a lawsuit against his parents. Their much
more serious crime, he claims, was giving birth to him; bringing him into a
world so harsh and unforgiving that he never stood a chance.
From there,
we spring backward to see Zain’s life and the circumstances that led him to
this dire place. We see him living in a cramped apartment in the slum of Beirut
with his neglectful parents and several siblings, forced to fend for himself
selling juice on the street. He seems indifferent to most of his family (and
they to him), but he’s fiercely protective of his 11-year-old sister, Sahar (Cedra Izam).
When Sahar
gets her period, Zain grows worried that her blossoming womanhood means that
she’ll be sold into a marriage to middle-aged shopkeeper Assaad.
He tries desperately to prevent this from happening, but as things play out
exactly as he feared, he reaches his limits and runs away.
He takes
temporary refuge at an amusement park and is eventually befriended, then taken
in by one of the workers, an Ethiopian migrant worker and single mother named
Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw)
who invites him to stay with her and her toddler, Yonas
(the remarkable Boluwatife Treasure Bankole). But as an undocumented migrant, Rahil is herself
subject to the manipulations of the authorities and unscrupulous predators of
the street.
The film’s
title comes from the name of an ancient Israeli city, which over time has
become a term meaning disorder and chaos, a constant way of life for those in
the film’s Beirut underbelly setting. It’s a place crowded with refugees, many
fleeing the war in neighboring Syria. These undocumented migrants lead impossible
lives, ever vulnerable to individuals more than willing to take advantage of
their situation.
As a plot
device, Zain’s lawsuit itself is not entirely convincing; it never feels like
something the boy might actually see as a possibility. As a framing story, it
lets the audience know that Zain makes it through his ordeal alive, though it
muddies the audience’s sympathies, asking us to both to root for Zain and think
that the easiest way for him to avoid all that suffering would have been if
he’d never been born in the first place. Labaki aims
for empathy, but in so stacking the deck against Zain, the emotion she stirs up
too often feels like pity.
The journey
we take with Zain can be unduly grueling — the narrative constantly teeters on
the brink of miserabilism — but thankfully Labaki provides moments of tenderness and finds ways to
inject small bits of humor when she can. Most of all, it helps that the film is
built around an incredible, singular performance from Zain Al Rafeea as Zain. The young actor is an unforgettable,
charismatic presence. His is a performance I can easily see coming up in future
discussions about all-time great work by child actors. It’s because of him that
we can look past the manipulations of the film’s script to find a powerful
story of one extraordinary boy’s enduring will to survive.
This article appears in Feb 13-19, 2019.
