Country: Lebanon
Director: Nadine Labaki
Duration: 2 hours and 6 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Amazon or GooglePlay
What It Elicits: Slums, child poverty, social and familial breakdown
I am reliably informed, though unable to confirm via Google, that an old Ottoman saying runs thus: “To know is not necessarily to understand.” My preferred interpretation of this maxim underscores the distinction between analytical comprehension and emotional appreciation. It remains one thing to intellectually grasp the fact that 730-750 million people are expected to live in extreme poverty in 2021, quite another to emotionally internalize the implications for individual humans. This isn’t to argue empathy necessarily inaugurates productive action. Too close an emotional attachment can paralyze by cultivating a sense of despondence borne of hopelessness or, more usually, it can give rise to very natural coping mechanisms which encourage us to think away from unsavory circumstances. (A sense of impotence leading to frustration and reaction, I think, goes a long way to explaining the general trend towards more conservative views with age.) Films attempting to expose viewers to the degradation inherent in poverty must tow a line between these poles (awareness and despondence) and my response to these films tends to vary based on the vagaries of mood—after all, there is no pleasure in being made to feel downcast without a productive way out. Indeed, wider perspective on the human experience can be its own double-edged sword. If the most horrendous forms of human deprivation emerge as the comparison point against which other issues are measured, then nothing truly matters. At the same time, if the meaningless becomes invested with too much meaning [insert your preferred not real problem being elevated to the solipsistic status of “serious concern” here], we have a problem. As in all things, balance matters.
Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum centers around Zain, a child living in the squalor and disorder of a Beirut slum, and his journey to escape his mother and father and live (or, perhaps, exist) on his own in the city away from their “care” and decisions. The film begins in court with Zain attempting to legally separate himself from his parents’ custody. His explanations for this decision furnish the opportunity for the continual flashbacks comprising the film. Throughout his wanderings—or, perhaps, his descent into alternating levels of hell without a Virgil to guide him—he comes across an undocumented Ethiopian worker (documents throughout the film play a role in underscoring the cruelly farcical ways in which institutional exclusion functions) and, through a series of events, Zain ends up becoming responsible for her even younger child, Yonas. Labaki courts discomfort in her attempt to expose viewers to the grime and grievance of a poverty bereft of angels—this is not the world of rich versus poor, but poor versus poor. The truly desperate never come near wealth. The script’s use of a child as protagonist—its own double-edged choice which can occasionally feel like a form of emotional exploitation—mirrors other films from the Arab world playing on similar themes, most notably Morocco’s Ali Zaoua (2000) and Horses of God (2012), and draws from myriad works addressing similar issues from Pixote (Brazil, 1981) to Salaam Bombay! (India, 1988), among others. Harrowing and bleak and clear-eyed, the film quite consciously eschews the stylized contrivances of City of God (2002) or Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Whether Capernaum fosters awareness without courting despondence remains an open question. For those more or less attuned to the situation in Lebanon, part of the film’s horror rests in the country’s current slide into almost complete state collapse, a problem temporarily mitigated but fundamentally unchanged by infusions of aid. Does Capernaum’s emotional power offer its viewer something greater than an ever-increasing sense of helplessness in the face of longstanding, structural failures? Does it persuade individuals to action? I think one has to believe so, even without evidence. For, in another sense, to understand is rarely to know.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Mira Nair — Salaam Bombay! (1988)
Nabil Ayouch — Ali Zaoua (2000)