Film review

  • Capernaum

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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 …

  • Sunset

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Napszállta

    László Nemes (2018)

    The action is set in and the sun setting on the Austro-Hungarian Empire.   The time is 1913.   The place is Budapest; Vienna plays a part in the story too.    In a well-appointed city store, a young woman (Juli Jakab) tries on a succession of beautiful hats before telling the salesperson she’s not a customer but an applicant for a hat-making job.  The interview that follows is stopped in its tracks when the candidate gives her name as Írisz Leiter.  Leiter is also the name of the store; Írisz explains that she is the daughter of its former, now deceased owners.  The surprises in this opening scene of László Nemes’s new film are promising but not a sign of things to come.  Sunset is lethally repetitive.

    Although Leiter’s new owner (Vlad Ivanov) doesn’t want Írisz on his staff, it’s not long before she’s back at the store and it remains her base throughout.  The place is essential to Nemes’s scheme too:  he uses millinery to epitomise the soon-to-end belle époque.  The mayhem and violence that lurk in the streets outside the elegant hat shop lie in wait on a much larger scale in 1914.  It’s not long either before the heroine is searching Budapest for a brother of whose existence she was previously unaware and the director is visualising the action from her point of view.  Just as in Son of Saul (2015), their previous collaboration, Nemes and his cinematographer Mátyás Erdély follow the main character with a hand-held camera:  the audience thereby shares in the discovery of what’s round the next corner.  The effect is different here, though.  What Írisz finds rarely has the shocking impact of what confronts Saul.  Besides, since Nemes has used the technique before, the viewer is much more aware of it as just that – a technique.  I naturally pricked up my ears at a sequence in Sunset in which a fortune-teller is heard speaking the words of T S Eliot’s tarot-reader Madame Sosostris but this too is Nemes repeating himself:  he referenced The Waste Land in his 2007 short With a Little Patience (see note on Son of Saul).  Other characters keep warning Írisz not to pursue her search and she keeps disobeying their advice, to monotonous effect.   A for-men-only motif in the narrative builds to an episode in which Írisz pretends to be a man.  In the film’s final shot, she stares into the camera from a Great War dugout.  It’s been a long (142-minute) and tedious journey getting there.

    Tricia Tuttle, this year’s artistic director for the London Film Festival, introduced László Nemes and Juli Jakab (who lacks the range and variety needed to keep us interested in Írisz) ahead of this LFF screening.  Tuttle described Sunset as an ‘astonishing’ achievement for what is only Nemes’s second feature.  The film is a precocious piece of work but not in a good way.  It’s remarkable how quickly this writer-director (he did the screenplay with Clara Royer and Matthieu Taponier) has descended into heavyweight turgidity.  Sunset sometimes comes across as a near-parody of arthouse cinema tropes:  for example, whenever one character asks of another a question you’d like the answer to, it’s a safe bet none will be forthcoming and that Nemes will simply move on without the questioner reacting to the lack of response.  Now that he’s got it out of his system, it’s to be hoped this film proves a mere blip in László Nemes’s career.  At least he did the right thing in correcting Tricia Tuttle when she told us Son of Saul won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.  Nemes’s amiable but firm amendment – Son of Saul won the Cannes Grand Prix – prompted a casual, same-difference reaction from Tuttle.  The moral of the story:  if you’re in charge of a major international film festival but don’t think movie awards are worth winning, don’t bother mentioning them; if you do mention them, get the facts right.

    16 October 2018

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