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At the very end of Nadine Labaki's heartbreaking and righteously angry new film we see a smile break across twelve year old protagonist Zain's face. That's not a spoiler alert (honest) but it was at that point for me, that the penny dropped, it was first time I'd seen Zain (an exceptional performance by the Syrian actor Zain Al Rafeea) beam in the entire two hour plus film.
So, it's not an easy watch - you need to prepare yourself - but it is a rewarding one. This is a film that if you don't come away from it furious with the governments of the world, hell - the adults of the world, that you maybe need to take a long hard look at yourself and whatever you're passing of as your soul these days.
The premise is easy enough to comprehend but trickier to understand. The story makes perfect sense but you ask yourself time and time again, why would these people, these supposed grown ups, continually do such awful things? Zain, a twelve year old Lebanese boy, lives with his parents, Selim and Souad, and several siblings in a less than salubrious part of Beirut.
In fact, their home is positively squalid and the lack of warmth, compassion, and love dished out to Zain and his brothers and sisters is scant consolation for their penurious, borderline criminal, and sometimes actual criminal, existence. Zain and his favourite sister Sahar (Cedra Izam) sell beetroot juice to passing drivers, pocket goods from local stores, and, at all times, keep a streetwise vigil about them to avoid becoming the victims of their elders.
Zain's love for Sahar is one of the film's beacons of hope. He looks after her on the street and when he spots a patch of blood on the eleven year old's shorts he washes them for her and tells her to shove one of his t-shirts down her 'panties' so her parents don't notice she's started having periods. The fear being that now she has 'blossomed' her parents will marry her off to a much older man. She's ELEVEN so it was unlikely to be a younger man.
Both parents regularly clout Zain. Mother Souad (Kawthar Al Haddad) being the chief instigator of the abuse while weak father Selim (Fadi Kamel Youssef) either lies half-asleep on a moth eaten couch or looks for others to blame for his circumstances. When Sahar is wrested away from Zain's protection (this is early on so, again, no spoiler), Zain decides enough is enough and hops a bus to a seaside town where he's taken in by Ethiopian refugee Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw) who seems to be in some sort of problem with local tradesman and, from the start, obvious wrong 'un, Aspro (Alaa Chouchnieh).
Rahil's had a baby, Yonas (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole), that she hasn't declared to the Lebanese government so an agreement is struck that Rahil will give Zain a roof over his head if he looks after Yonas while she's out mopping the floors of the cafeteria in the local amusement park. Zain being too young to find gainful employment.
It's here where the story, and the lives of Zain and Rahil, really begin to unspool. There are warm touching scenes between Zain and Yonas as they bond with each other and equally tender scenes between Rahil and Zain as, with Yonas, they form a very unconventional family, but there are also peeks beneath the very thin veneer of respectability that Aspro's stall at the nearby souk provide.
Zain meets a Syrian refugee, Maysoun (Farah Hasno), and she outlines her plans to escape to Sweden where she can finally be safe.,Zain pulls Yonas around in a bizarre improvised go-kart, they wash using hoses in a garage, and, at all times, their very existence seems utterly parlous. In fact, at times, due to Zain's lack of papers and Yonas's unofficial status, it's suggested they barely qualify as human beings at all.
This seems to be where ideas of capitalism, nationhood, and adult pride lead us. To a society where there have to be winners, and if there have to be winners then there have to be losers. Often those losers are the children. The whole film begins with Zain in court attempting to sue his family for birthing him into such a vile world. It's a trifle hard to believe, perhaps the only touch of magic realism in an otherwise veracious account of lives lived in the margins, but it serves to illustrate the deep and uncomfortable truths I've outlined above in a way that, briefly, cuts through the grime and pollution that are constant companions in Zain's ever more precarious existence.
I've never been to Lebanon, much less Beirut itself, so I can't vouch for how accurate a depiction of the city this is. But, at all times, it feels utterly real. You get that sense of looking at the world through the eyes of a child and all the hurt and confusion that instils in a person, but you also get to feel the pain of an infant forced to grow wise beyond their years, deprived the pleasures of an ordinary childhood, and yet, somehow, still managing to guide themselves through life with a more powerful moral compass than the adults that should be looking out for, and looking after, them.
What a mess of a world we're leaving for the next generation. Let's hope there are, genuinely, kids like Zain out there growing up who are prepared to make a braver future than our generation's moral cowardice and craven grasping for consumer goods has passed on to them.
The fact that all of this came across so passionately, and so clearly, in Capernaum is down to taut, though never suffocating, direction from Labaki and a host of wonderful performances from Al Rafeea, Shiferaw, Al Haddad, Youssef, Hasno, and Chouchnieh as well as a special mention for Bankole as Yonas. Unsure exactly how much direction one can give a baby, or a baby can take, but you get a terrific sense of vulnerability each time Yonas is on screen. Perhaps because both the fear and the oblivion that we're all born with in some ways never really leaves us.
File alongside Hirokazu Kore-ade's recent Shoplifters in what's becoming both a vital new genre of international social realism and a necessary corrective to a world that is once again swooning under the spell of 'strong' leadership, yet failing to use that leadership in any way other than to make the rich even richer and the poor even poorer.
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