Review: Capernaum

Capernaum (15)

Lebanon/France/USA 2018  126 mins  Dir: Nadine Labaki  Cast: Zain Al Rafeea, Yordanos Shiferaw, Boluwatife Treasure Bankole, Haita ‘Cedra’ Izzam, Kawthar Al Haddad, Fadi Kamel Youssef

The surly, resentful and somewhat bewildered parents of a potty-mouthed 12-year-old boy find themselves hauled before a court. Their handcuffed jailbird son, who’s doing serious bird for stabbing a ‘sonofabitch’, tells the judge he wants to sue them for the crime of giving him life.

Opening scenes don’t get much more, ahem, arresting than this and, as you might expect, Lebanese Caramel director Nadine Labaki’s Oscar nominated return to something approaching form after her woolly, lightly feminist Middle Eastern wish-fulfilment drama Where Do We Go Now? proceeds to do the flashback thing to reveal how this embittered little tyke came to call upon the services of m’learned friends. We learn that Zain (Zain Al Rafeea) grew up in squalor with an unspecified but substantial number of siblings in a Beirut slum. Indeed, his parents Souad (Kawthar Al Haddad) and Selim (Fadi Kamel Youssef) are so poor that they couldn’t even afford to register his birth, rendering him a non-person as far as the state is concerned – which will cause all kinds of problems down the line. But despite their reproductive incontinence, the couple are possessed of a certain low cunning, smuggling deviously acquired prescription opioids into the grim local slammer where, inevitably, several members of the extended family are banged up.

The breaking point for Zain comes when his beloved 11-year-old sister Sahar (Haita ‘Cedra’ Izzam) reaches puberty. Despite our pint-sized hero’s efforts to conceal evidence of her menstruation, their parents soon realise that she’s ripe for bartering with the seedy local grocer and receive a reasonable quantity of live chickens in return for her virginity and tiny hand in marriage. Zain goes on the run, eventually teaming up with kindly unregistered Ethiopian immigrant Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw), who lives in a shack with her one-year-old son (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole). But when Rahil disappears, he’s left literally holding the baby – dragging the tot through the streets in a pot lashed to a stolen skateboard.

Cynics should be advised that this is indeed a melodramatic slice of arthouse poverty porn, with a highly implausible central conceit and a coincidence-ridden, wholly unearned, moderately happy ending. But Labaki evinces real empathy for these characters and where she really scores is in getting such believable performances out of her mostly non-professional and often very young cast, many of whom who have direct experience of this world. In particular, she never loses sight of the fact that, for all his defensive swagger, Zain is a damaged child (“Life is dogshit” he declares to the court, and it’s hard to disagree given the supporting evidence). Shame, then, that while the film covers a lot of thematic ground – grinding poverty, child brides, vulnerable and exploited refugees, people trafficking, opioid abuse, etc – Zain’s radical mission to prevent his parents having any more children goes unresolved. But there’s a welcome seam of humour amid the misery. Who could fail to warm to elderly, chain-smoking, Armenian Cockroach Man? This dim-witted theme park barker and self-styled slum cousin of Spider-Man wears a shabby costume and seems to have no powers at all – super or otherwise. Marvel ought to snap him up immediately.