Caper­naum – first look review

Caper­naum could be dis­missed as sen­ti­men­tal and unsub­tle were it not for the fact it is under­pinned by a del­i­cate­ly woven phi­los­o­phy about how to keep your human­i­ty intact. Har­ness­ing the visu­al pow­er of faces made wretched by grind­ing pover­ty, with bit­ter hys­ter­ics just one provo­ca­tion away from the sur­face, Nadine Labaki’s Lebanon-set fable about a 12-year-old boy named Zain (Zain Alrafeea) coun­ter­bal­ances scenes of suf­fer­ing with scenes that show how car­ing about a sin­gle oth­er human can pre­serve what makes life worth the strug­gle. She presents the alter­na­tive, not car­ing about any­one else, as the surest way to con­tribute to the swamp of hopelessness.

Laba­ki doesn’t blame those who have giv­en up hope in oth­er peo­ple. This out­come is under­stand­able with­in the dev­as­tat­ing world she depicts. Instead she shows that giv­ing up on your near­est and dear­est is no sur­vival strat­e­gy, because life goes on and is even hard­er with­out lov­ing bonds to keep you going.

The colour­ful and noisy bus­tle of Beirut is the set­ting, and it’s here we meet a large fam­i­ly liv­ing in a small house. Kids over­run the place, but have been taught to make them­selves use­ful, so Zain and his tiny, exquis­ite­ly-fea­tured younger sis­ter, Sahar (Cedea Izam), weave though the streets, knee-high to most adults, sell­ing chopped up fruit to rich peo­ple in pass­ing cars. Some cin­e­mat­ic depic­tions of child pover­ty trade on the iron­clad inno­cence of youth. Here the young cast have an ancient weari­ness in their eyes. The cam­era fol­lows them doc­u­men­tary-style, dodg­ing the paws of the lech­er­ous giants all around, show­ing that alert­ness to trau­mat­ic dan­gers has been accli­ma­tised as part of their days.

Some­thing ter­ri­ble hap­pens, and as a result Zain hits the road and ends up being tak­en in by a soft-heart­ed ille­gal immi­grant named Tigest. She has a child of her own named Yonas, whose pres­ence her­alds a sec­tion alive with the joy of ten­der­ness. Baby Yonas has the most cheru­bic of faces and the most san­guine of per­son­al­i­ties. He has no aware­ness of the pre­car­i­ous­ness of his liv­ing sit­u­a­tion. This dis­po­si­tion cuts through the unre­lent­ing dirge feel that has set the tone so far drum­ming up a sense of sacred innocence.

For Zain ends up babysit­ting while Tigest goes to work. Like a corpse com­ing to life, the exis­tence of a hap­py baby scans like a mir­a­cle. Yonas has a toy which plays dance music, and as he baby-stomp-dances to it, Labaki’s inten­tions become clear – this is not mis­ery porn, but emo­tion­al­ly vivid cin­e­ma, with mis­ery as a base note and human­i­ty as its sky­ward pole.

This is not a struc­tural­ly per­fect or nar­ra­tive­ly sat­is­fy­ing film. It is framed by court­room scenes in which we are told that Zain stabbed a man and is suing his par­ents for allow­ing him to be born. The bulk of the sto­ry is posi­tioned as a flash­back which will resolve these ear­ly shots fired. This doesn’t real­ly hap­pen, or it hap­pens too offhand­ed­ly to impact the vérité clut­ter of the atmosphere.

The sto­ry­telling is under­whelm­ing, but the world­build­ing is over­whelm­ing. So too are the per­for­mances of Zain’s mum and dad which are pow­ered by oper­at­ic raw­ness. Hold­ing every­thing togeth­er, weak parts and strong, is the cen­tral per­for­mances by Zain Alrafeea. That one so tiny should know how to make suf­fer­ing shine from his eyes makes you won­der about the performer’s back­sto­ry. He imbues this pres­ence with a street-tough atti­tude, yelling at adults to keep away as he drags Yonas around in a pan strapped to a skate­board attached to a rope. (Yonas peers out of his pan curi­ous­ly, like a dog in a motor­cy­cle sidecar.)

Although Laba­ki is focused on the plight of Zain, she punc­tu­ates his arc with sev­er­al heli­copter shot of the sprawl of the slums con­vey­ing that the prob­lem of pover­ty is big­ger than one boy and his fam­i­ly. Caper­naum may resort to repeat­ing the same note, but it is exe­cut­ed with orches­tral res­o­nance, aid­ed by Khaled Mouzanar’s ele­giac score, play­ing like a requiem for the casu­al­ties of cal­lous governance.