‘CAPERNAUM’ IS POWERFUL TALE OF INNOCENCE LOST
ZAIN AL RAFEEA STARS IN “CAPERNAUM.”
The Japanese drama “Shoplifters,” nominated for a foreignlanguage-film Oscar, trains its lens on a likable poor family of low-level criminals barely eking out a living in a society often painted as a gleaming technocracy. The Lebanese drama “Capernaum,” also competing in the same category, also focuses on a poor family of lawbreakers, but instead of eliciting sympathy, they engender disgust.
So much so that one of the children, 12-year-old Zain — though he’s not sure of his age, since his parents couldn’t be bothered to remember when his birth date is — tries to sue his abusive mother and father as demonstrably unfit. That’s probably the best filial response a parent can expect if they’re smuggling drugs, looking to offload one of their kids to their gangster bosses and admit in court that they didn’t really want children in the first place.
But if “Capernaum” — from the word “capharnaum,” which means chaos — seems like it’s going to be just two hours of desperation, degradation and family discord (though there’s plenty of all three), it ultimately ends up as an inspiring evocation of the human spirit, thanks to the explosive presence of Zain (a wonderful Zain Al Rafeea, a Syrian refugee in his first major role, the case for many in a cast of largely nonprofessionals).
If Zain at first seems hardened by the experiences in his short life, he still has the capacity for empathy. He demonstrates that when, after fleeing home, he insinuates himself into the life of Rahil (Yordanis Shiferaw), an undocumented Ethiopian immigrant who has to hide her baby, Yonas, from her employer and authorities.
At first, they form a tenuous alliance — she needs someone to watch Yonas when she’s at work, he needs food and shelter — but what at first was a function of necessity becomes something resembling a family. And if his baby-sitting skills are sometimes questionable, they’re never less than sincere.
There are moments when “Capernaum” brings to mind the 2016 film “Lion” — both have a young boy on his own in a forbidding, dusty big city — but whereas the PG-13 “Lion” never got as grim as it might have, the R-rated “Capernaum” is often more bleak. You just know that the shred of emotional piece he finds with Rahil can’t last.
“Capernaum” is directed and co-written by Nadine Labaki (“Where Do We Go Now?”), notably the only female director with a film in the running at the Oscars this year, with a bracing sense of street-level social realism.
For example, it’s not often in Western films that viewers get to see how immigrants from subSaharan Africa are viewed and treated in the Middle East. And it’s never mawkish, feeling at times like it could be a documentary about life in Beirut’s shabbiest neighborhoods.
The film has been castigated in some quarters for being overly manipulative — only a monster doesn’t respond to a child in peril, no matter how artless the narrative — but “Capernaum” overcomes its built-in clichés to forcefully tell a story as urgent as the latest breaking-news bulletin.