The boy wants to file a complaint against his parents. Why? Because they gave birth to him. Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki's extremely hard-hitting film, Capernaum, gives us enough compelling reasons to endorse the boy's argument. He makes the statement in court in the presence of his parents and several others who contributed to the boy's deeply cynical outlook on life. For him, life is hell on earth. The boy is only 12, but has seen way too many things that you wonder whether he is a 22-year-old man in the body of a 12-year-old. He sports an expressionless face, on a head that's larger than the rest of the body but it's a face that suggests so many terrible stories. Labaki neither shows the violent act that led to the boy being arrested, nor the incident that acted as a trigger for him. It's a sensible filmmaking choice because the world of Zain (Zain Al Rafeea) is ready too painful.
But Capernaum is not an attempt at misery porn intended to get awards attention. Labaki, who also directed the excellent 2007 film Caramel, is not a filmmaker who resorts to cheap tactics or melodramatic excess to get the tears flowing. She just points the camera at the actors — including Zain, some of the principal actors are real Syrian refugees — and the Beirut environment they live in. Her camera goes wide and close, tracking them from behind and front, observing them in stationary and frenetic moments, enough to give us the complete sense of what these individuals have to deal with on a daily basis. There are worldless, at times haunting, images that speak volumes: Zain's baby sibling with one leg tied to a chair with a small chain; Zain's 11-year-old sister being approached on the streets by men who want to "show" her something; the blood stain on the bed that tells Zain it's time to visit the pharmacy; the male shopkeeper who takes a fancy to his 11-year-old sister and sends "gifts" which Zain throws into the dumpster without her knowledge. There are more situations that naturally make us strongly empathise with the boy.
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Zain is not just dealing with the plight of two siblings, but more. It's a family living illegally, in dire straits, but for some odd reason, they keep having children, much to the chagrin of Zain. But the expression of outburst is felt more strongly towards the film's third act, when it's revealed why Zain was arrested and why his parents decided to have another child. How can our minds not get boggled by their decision? Haven't they gone through enough? We ask. When Zain tells his mother that he finds her "unbelievable", we nod our heads in agreement. But before the film arrives there, it takes us through another transformative plot development, involving an undocumented Ethiopian woman and her child, which precedes the aforementioned scenario. It's this development that the film uses as an example to tell us that it's not against everyone who decides to have children, despite the hardships they face. It's just that some events are beyond their control.
Capernaum also undertakes the task of humanising the characters who, in Zain's eyes, are "evil", no matter how uncomfortable. It’s necessary because it reveals a real problem. We realise that some of their decisions were governed by conditioning passed through generations and, in some cases, just plain, jaw-dropping ignorance. There's also a pivotal point in the film where Zain ends up doing something that mirrors exactly what his parents did once, the very deed for which Zain reprimanded them. But the story is not without a glimmer of hope. The film's closing shot — the most memorable since the one in Memories of Murder — invites dual (or multiple) interpretations. For some, Capernaum might be too depressing. I see it as a therapeutic film that not only lends a shoulder of solidarity in moments of distress — how many, irrespective of the degrees of privilege they were born into, have cursed their parents for bringing them into this world? — but also to remind some of us that our existence is not as bad as Zain's, and that maybe we need to draw courage from the manner in which he forges ahead.