Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum is a gut-wrenching drama about a Beirut child who sues his parents for giving birth to him, and his encounter before ending up on the street is befriended by a Ethiopian woman, stays with her, caring for her baby!
Zain, born in Beirut’s underbelly is angry. Angry by the malformed indignity, indifference and cruelty inflicted upon him and his siblings as a result of enduring poverty. He is angry at the defeating submissiveness of his parents, who displace their filth over comfort upon their children.
We live in a society where people from poverty are better in posters, for being on service feed but I too being guilty of not allowing one into my own life. I am a coward that way! Zain’s parents are smuggling drugs into prison where his elder brother is a convict.
To Zain’s horror, his haggard parents mother Souad and father Selim agreed upon selling Zain’s eleven year-old sister Sahar to their exploitative landlord’s son as a child bride.
Zain decides not to be the martyr, he revolts!
“Capernaum” means “Chaos” and Nadine Labaki represents the town on the Sea of Galilee where Jesus healed the sick is parallel to Jain’s tumultuous existence is ironic.
Jain’s mind is profound of anger that perhaps is born within him in absence of love and comfort he deserved at his age. It is his way before maturity that makes him angrier of his inability to grown up as a happy, normal child.
Even looking after Yonas inflicts upon Zain more anger and hate for parents from whom parenthood is a mistake, the redemption of which is pure hatred and careworn attitude towards their own children. Capernaum insists upon looking back at anger, the contempt the child bears and broods in the death of innocence.
Yonas only made Zain more acquainted with the ever rotting Beirut’s underbelly of poverty and injustice that has the audacity to pursue anyone to make awful choices in hunger and filth.
The walks of Yonas with Zain in the merciless streets of Beirut are heart-wrenching to watch, how their innocence and fragility dying a slow death every hour is transcendental survival in the most painful way.
Even Aspro calling the baby “a badass – like his mother” is rather antithetical as a shallow person’s convenience to pretend that a child merely two years old has to be strong just as the parent is, in poverty.
In the end, Capernaum is a shout-out at us, asking us to figure out the identities of Jain and Yonas in this world, what happens to children like them?
Capernaum is not a happy story of strength or social bravery but it an ugly representation of people in poverty and their children. It is an unapologetic preface of a child who is angry on the existing monotones of our society, it’s technical mechanisms and the authority that allows parenthood but is least bothered about basic parenting that every child deserves!
Perhaps, we look closely, we will somewhere see our hideous faces too!
“I want to make a complaint against my parents. I’d want adults to listen to me. I want adults who can’t raise kids not to have any. What will I remember? Violence, insults or beatings, hit with chains, pipes, or a belt? The kindest words I heard were get out son of a whore. Bug off, piece of garbage. Life is a pile of shit. Not worth more than my shoe. I live in hell here. I burn like rotting meat. Life is a bitch.I thought we’d become good people, loved by all. But God doesn’t want that for us. He’d rather we be washrags for others. The child you’re carrying will be like I am.”
