Capernaum

Early in “Capernaum,” a judge asks the 12-year-old boy standing trial in a Beirut courtroom, “Why do you want to sue your parents?” He responds, “Because I was born.” Here’s where we’re supposed to gasp and cluck our tongues, else we have no soul.

This revved-up line, like most of its neo-neorealist film, pays homage to the famous quote “I curse the day I was born,” uttered by the father Antonio (mired in postwar Italian poverty, desperate for a job to feed his starving wife and son) in Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” (1948). But “Capernaum” ups the ante by having the line spoken by the photogenic son, Zain, instead of the harried father, and by having the son bear witness to an endless parade of cruelties. Zain’s 11-year-old sister is married off to and impregnated by the landlord’s son, separated in a scene recalling Chaplin’s “The Kid” (1921). Forced out of his home by his abhorrent parents, Zain finds shelter in a roach-infested shantytown with undocumented Ethiopian refugee Rahil. She slaves to bring some bread home to her baby, but when she is suddenly arrested at work, Zain must take the hungry baby under his wing.

Throughout, Lebanese director Nadine Labaki delivers the cheap emo goods faster than an Amazon Prime package, and “Capernaum” is just as soul-killing. Her film reduces agonized-over philosophical choices of the Italian neorealists (De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, early Luchino Visconti) to a grab bag of aesthetic tricks. A non-actor here, a shaky-cam fight there, and voila: instant knowledge of the world beyond your own bubble.

Here’s the moral difference: “Bicycle Thieves” made drama out of the doldrums of everyday misery, its plot was unadorned of any extra riders, its sense of moral outrage reflected by its bare style and the bare space in which it allowed its actors to work. By contrast, “Capernaum” is so slick and packaged in every shot, so gummed up with effects, flourishes and cliches, that the viewer leaves the theater feeling like a person battered with a sledgehammer marked “Empathy”— a label pasted over the true inscription, “Pity.” The neorealists nudged. “Capernaum” hectors you to see, dammit! cry, dammit! feel, dammit!

The only reason to watch is to witness a star being cynically born: 14-year-old Zain Al Rafeea (whose character name is also Zain). Ever since the film won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, he’s been advertised as a pintsized James Dean. Actually, Zain has none of Dean’s writhing paranoia; with a tighter self-control than Dean’s balls of adolescent rage, this jaded little man of few words except “sonuvabitch” has more in common with the brash, selfassured Jean-Pierre Léaud of Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” (1959). Zain’s punk attitude (the way he brandishes a knife, knowing exactly where it needs to be stuck in the stomach to draw the most blood) is neither fake nor put-on. His eyes are filled with a contempt for life that the square-angled film around him never allows to bloom in all its stubbornness and malignancy.

One wishes for a movie better grooved to his natural talent. Labaki pushes her camera practically up his nose in endless, distracting close-ups. She allows her lead actor no intimacy, forbidding an unfettered, anti-movie, string-and-choir-free reality from creeping in. The pain in Zain’s eyes is overlit into Instagrammable moody shots, looking off knowingly into a deep, deep unknown that we can never know.

Fearing we won’t get the point, Labaki slathers on overblown string music by Khaled Mouzanar. Moments of raw existential angst (Zain’s performance, a shot of him feeding powdered milk to the wincing-in-pain baby on the side of a busy freeway, a shot of Rahil expunging milk from her heavy breasts) are cheapened by the horribly obvious score. The most effective and truthful instrument is not the fauxprofound violin, but the baby and the endless caterwauling it produces: a sustained whine followed by a three-pronged froggy croak, as if trying to shake out the final few droplets of pain before the cycle starts again.

Real life is the supposed target of “Capernaum,” but the filmmakers exhaust most of their energy squeezing plot beats into place. They don’t know how to cultivate the unmannered, freaky, unsettling outer world beyond their grip (the match strikes on the wall in “Umberto D.,” the vacuous loneliness of the inside of a cinema in “The Exiles,” “Wanda” or “Roma”).

Sony Pictures Classics Zain Al Rafeea (right) plays Zain, who must take a hungry baby, played by Boluwatife Treasure Bankole, under his wing on the streets of Beirut in “Capernaum.”