Nadine Labaki (2018)
In the Christian gospels, the village of Capernaum on the shores of the Sea of Galilee is a place where Jesus performs miracles. Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum, showing at the London Film Festival, describes a world in which divine intervention is conspicuous by its absence. In his concluding speech, the film’s twelve-year-old protagonist Zain (Zain al Rafeea) denounces God: ‘I thought I’d grow up to be a good and respected man but God doesn’t want that – he wants us to be floor mats’[1]. According to Wikipedia, the word ‘capharnaum’, derived from the village’s name, came to mean ‘a place with a “disorderly accumulation of objects” ‘. This is the sense of the title of Labaki’s film: when ‘Capernaum’ appears on the screen at the start, the accompanying English subtitle is ‘Chaos’.
Written by Labaki and others (Jihad Hojaily, Michelle Keserwany, Georges Khabbaz, Khaled Mouzanar), Capernaum is a distinctive coming-of-age story, set in present-day Lebanon. Zain starts off as a tough, streetwise kid, living with his family in poor and cramped conditions in Beirut. Disgusted when his parents (Kawsar Al Haddad and Fadi Yousef) sell his eleven-year-old sister Sahar (Haita ‘Cedra’ Izzam) in marriage to a local shopkeeper, Zain runs away from home and starts living on his wits. He meets Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw), an Ethiopian refugee, and looks after her infant son Yonas (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole) when she’s out at work. Zain eventually returns home and, after learning of Sahar’s fate, commits a violent crime in revenge. He is sentenced to five years in prison. While in jail, he takes his mother and father to court – on the charge of bringing him into the world.
This extraordinary notion is a real hook and the trial sequences, staged realistically, are intriguing at first, as the judge (Elias Khoury) questions Zain and his parents. But the courtroom conceit proves to have less substance than it seems to promise, supplying little more than a basic narrative framework for the main action describing the boy’s odyssey. In the end, it’s not even clear if the trial is purely metaphorical – there’s no indication of a verdict being given or sentence passed. Although Nadine Labaki no doubt believes the film’s audience must form their own moral judgment, this still seems a bit of a cheat. We wouldn’t have engaged with her story in the same way if we hadn’t at first thought that an actual trial was taking place.
Capernaum, though sometimes emotionally powerful, is problematic in ways that Labaki surely didn’t intend. With her DP Christopher Aoun, she creates some remarkable overhead shots of blasted areas of Beirut; she also provides various potent illustrations of dehumanisation. Whether these offer fresh insight into hardship familiar from television news and documentary is arguable. Most viewers of the film won’t need to be shown the effects of benighted tradition and poverty on an innocent kid in order to be appalled by them. Zain is endlessly fearless and resourceful – right through to the moment when, in prison, he watches a TV phone-in programme about the mistreatment of children and seizes the opportunity. His call is broadcast; this triggers the lawsuit against his parents. Yet Labaki’s attempt to show the resilience of a child in adversity is caught in the same sort of bind as Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild a few years ago. In dramatising Zain’s courage and endurance, Capernaum makes him thoroughly exceptional among the youngsters who appear in the film. That makes it less easy to see him as representative of a generation trapped in the same deprivation.
The film is often awkward when Labaki strains for a dramatic highlight, especially when the highlight is centred on Rahil, well though Yordanos Shiferaw plays her. It feels forced when this young woman, also now in detention, catches sight of Zain among the crowds of prisoners in the jail they’re both in and calls out to him. Even though it’s touching, Rahil’s final reunion with her child is more willed than convincing. The polished rhetoric of Zain’s indictment of God is a jarring departure from the boy’s usual foul-mouthed wit. Zain al Rafeea shows great stamina as well as plenty of talent in carrying the huge load that Nadine Labaki places on him. She expects a lot of the toddler playing Rahil’s son too and this is sometimes uncomfortable to watch. When Yonas is crying, this can’t be because Boluwatife Treasure Bankole (a girl) is a precociously good actor. It must be because she’s truly upset.
18 October 2018
[1] Or words to that effect …
