Capernaum (Capharnaüm)

Director Nadine Labaki

Labaki on the set

Labaki with child actor Zain Al Rafeea

CAPERNAUM (Capharnaüm)                  B-                   

Lebanon  France  USA  (126 mi)  2018 ‘Scope d:  Nadine Labaki            Official site

A wrenching street drama that has drawn plenty of attention, awarded the Jury Prize at Cannes where it received a 15-minute standing ovation after the initial screening, becoming the highest grossing Arabic-language film and the highest grossing Middle-Eastern film of all time, where its strongest showing is in international box office receipts, with a particularly strong showing in China.  What does this all mean?  While it’s been compared to Buñuel’s LOS OLVIDADOS (1950) or Babenco’s PIXOTE (1981) in terms of its searing social realism, nothing could be further from the truth, as instead of a seethingly unsentimentalized portrait, this is distinctly manipulative, the picture of poverty porn, where each image is carefully chosen to elicit the strongest feelings of emotional pity, literally rubbing the viewer’s face in an unending misery that couldn’t be more wretched.  To this end, the film is a complete success, immersed in social realism, using non-professionals, many having lived through similar experiences, but given heavy doses of melodrama and commercialized tears and pathos, arguably more in line with Danny Boyle’s SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (2008), glossing over many of the real social issues plaguing these victims, like how did they get there, avoiding the racist, sexist, and nationalist barriers that women and refugees typically face, or the government’s complicity, instead becoming a travelogue through destitution and squalor, largely told through a child’s point of view, becoming relentlessly bleak, where viewers feel sorry for the protagonist and all that he has to endure.  All that’s missing are charity groups asking for donations after the film.  Compare that to the subtle craftsmanship of the best Middle-Eastern filmmakers like Kiarostami or Makhmalbaf where there isn’t an ounce of sentimentality.  Labaki began her directing career doing commercials and music videos, so finding ways to emotionally affect viewers is her stock and trade.  There’s nothing subtle about this film, as it’s in-your-face all the time, a pummeling assault to the senses with no breaks for the weary, where the sight of hundreds of children begging on the streets of Beirut has become the new normal.  It’s an eye-opening yet tiresome journey through the urban sprawl, in the graffiti-spewing alleyways still riddled with bullets and dilapidated shacks set in the ruins of bombed-out buildings, where slums arise in the uninhabitable regions that mostly don’t have electricity or running water, with people packed like sardines under tin roofs, sleeping on top of one another, mostly war-torn refugees (who comprise half the population in Lebanon at the moment) without papers or documentation, stuck in a state of limbo just trying to survive, doing anything they can, feeling like utter chaos in makeshift neighborhoods literally sprawling with kids, many with sticks substituting for Kalashnikov rifles, playing war games on the filthy streets, hellraisers in one of the darkest corners of the globe. 

Told almost entirely through flashback sequences, this is actually a courtroom drama, a moralizing tale, where a jailed Lebanese 12-year old, Zain (Zain Al Rafeea, a marvel, onscreen in nearly every shot, a Syrian refugee in real life who has miraculously made his way to Norway) is walked in slow motion from his prison cell in a juvenile detention center to the court in handcuffs, serving a five-year sentence for stabbing a man he describes as “a son of a bitch,” represented by an attorney who happens to be the filmmaker, as he’s bringing charges against his parents “because I was born,” for bringing him into this abject world, with no ID, no official record of his birth, keeping him out of school, forced to run errands for a malevolent landlord who runs a corner kiosk, turning him into a beggar on the streets, where he’s been called despicable names and menaced by street predators his entire life.  Any way you slice it, this is a preposterous premise, one that tugs on the heart strings, becoming an epic Darwinian journey through a pathetic existence, as we follow this young boy on his nightmarish road through hell.  His parents are among the candidates for the worst ever, putting all their children to work, regardless of their age, constantly threatening and berating them, running an illicit drug business, using their children as pawns while they hide in the shadows, with routine visits to jail to visit their older children, smuggling them drugs they can sell in prison.  This unhappy household sends Zain out into the streets, his only refuge, but it’s shark-infested waters, as he witnesses police harass and round up undocumented refugees, filling the jails to capacity without even blinking an eye.  Zain takes a protective view of his 11-year old sister Sahar (Haita “Cedra” Izzam), showing her how to hide her first period from her parents, as they’re quick on the trigger to marry her off once she blossoms into womanhood.  The man with his eye on her is the corrupt landlord Assad (Nour el Husseini), who threatens to throw the family out on the street unless he gets what he wants.  This kind of coercion is typical, causing families and generations of children to constantly live in fear of exposure to the authorities.  Devising a plan of escape with Sahar, Zain arrives too late, as his parents have already made the necessary arrangements, dragging her out of the home kicking and screaming, with his mother knocking Zain to the ground for interfering, brutally invoking a picture of childhood trauma, literally sold like slaves to the highest bidder, who offers a mere pittance of just a few chickens in return.  In disgust, Zain runs away, hopping on a bus, running into an eccentric man who works at an amusement park, following after him, finding himself lost in an underworld of anonymity with no one looking for him. 

Alone in the margins, the only people that notice him are others living in the same margins, as it’s a secretive world they inhabit, catching the eye of an Ethiopian custodian, Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw), who takes pity on him, cleaning him up and feeding him, allowing him to watch over her baby son Yonas (who is actually a girl!) while she’s at work.  In contrast to his own, Rahil is a loving mother, continuously doting on her baby, but time literally stops when she’s away, as they’re stuck indoors with literally nothing to do.  Being an enterprising young kid, he places a mirror out the window reflecting the TV cartoons playing in the adjoining quarters, so they can sit and watch while sequestered inside, never leaving the room, as Rahil is undocumented, using a forged work permit that’s about to expire, having trouble raising the money, leaving her in an exasperated state of fear.  When she doesn’t come home one night, the mood of the film creeps ever more dour, as their tenuous hold on reality turns savagely raw and primitive, living in a wretched state, deprived of all basic necessities.  This section, however, defines the film, as it’s basically children raising children with essentially no resources, which describes the plight of the refugee, ostracized and forgotten by civilized societies, living in total depravity, often in plain sight on the street, where it’s impossible to know when their next meal is coming.  Other than Zain, this baby has more screen time than anyone else, so we see him in every conceivable mood, hungry and inconsolable, with no clean diapers, where he’s a drooling mess of mucous and tears, not a pretty sight, but he also grows attached to Zain, who is forced to carry him everywhere, devising methods to haul him on a stolen skateboard, but they are a sight for sore eyes.  The irony here is that Zain is a Lebanese citizen, yet without papers he may as well be invisible, treated with the same scorn as refugees, who carry a hope at least of seeking asylum elsewhere, an option not available to Zain.  This downward spiral exhausts viewers, as this stretch feels monotonously dismal, with the mother rounded up and languishing in prison, equally distraught.  Occasional breaks back into the courtroom are the only relief from this catastrophic turn, but even there we get the self-justifying testimony of the deplorable parents, so there is literally no escape from this wretched terrain, with Labaki imprinting these dour images on her viewing public, forcing a skeptical public to see unfiltered views of the absolute worst circumstances on earth, which is balanced against the prison conditions, one no better than the other.  A theme of futility is everpresent, offering no signs of hope or change, as absolutely no solutions are even suggested.  Clearly the film exudes empathy, as this is the picture the director aspired to make, and some, at least, are lauding her for it, yet you can’t shake the moral patronizing, where the poor are paraded before the public like lab rats, then judged for being bad parents (even though they were born into similar circumstances), where it’s as heavy-handed and manipulative as a Spielberg film, the only difference being the politicized subject matter, as some directors simply don’t trust their audiences to figure things out, so everything has to be spelled out for them.  Lacking the poetry of the artform, those are the worst commercial instincts when it comes to cinema, regardless of intent.     

The Owners

 

Director Adilkhan Yerzhanov

THE OWNERS           B-                     

Kazakhstan  (93 mi)  2014  d:  Adilkhan Yerzhanov

 

A portrait of miserablism, poverty and gloom, as seen through a surrealist lens where tragedy and dark comedy intersect, where it’s worth noting that the remote nation of Kazakhstan, known as one of the least densely populated nations on earth (only Canada and Australia are lower) with less than 15 people per square mile, yet it has produced two of the most weirdly unusual films to hit film festivals in the past two years, with this coming after Emir Baigazin’s Harmony Lessons (Uroki garmonii) (2013), one of the best directed and edited films from last year.  Both are young directors that have graduated from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts, so New Kazakh cinema has become a breeding ground of originality and novelty.  Actually THE OWNERS is a follow-up to his previous film, the 67-minute black and white short film CONSTRUCTORS (2013) Constructors | Stroiteli | FIFF | Fribourg International Film ..., shooting in wildly exaggerated colors, where both are low-key, absurdist treatments of the difficulties encountered by individuals that strive to maintain any sense of dignity when they are swallowed up whole by the apathy and indifference of a Kafkaesque Eastern European bureaucracy that may as well be the remnants of a Stalinist Soviet system left behind, as Kazakhstan was the last of the Soviet republics to declare independence following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.  While the overall effect is a bit like Kaurismäki, with similar deadpan acting, but it’s not Kaurismäki, leaving something to be desired, namely the wit and zany characters that inhabit a Kaurismäki film.  It may be closer in tone to the Yorgos Lanthimos film DOGTOOTH (2009), though stylistically quite different, as both are interested in creating a weird and entirely unusual universe that seemingly exists on its own, as if floating on air, where much of it carries a fantasy oriented atmosphere of surrealist caricature.       

Our three orphaned protagonists are introduced by a child’s drawing where we see 25-year old John (Aidyn Sakhaman), the reluctant patriarch, an ex-con who has done time for petty crimes and remains unemployed, his younger teenage brother Yerbol (Yerbolat Yerzhan), a handsome aspiring actor who retains his sense of idealism, and their sickly 12-year old epileptic sister Aliya (Aliya Zainalova) who remains the most innocent of all, where the two younger actors reprise their roles from CONSTRUCTORS.  Aliya continually sees the world through a kind of magical realism where people are always smiling and happy, often seen performing dance routines, where this whimsical element is a stark contrast to the gloom that inhabits the rest of the picture.  Forced to leave the city when they can no longer pay the rent, they move to a remote village where their deceased mother left them a house, carrying the deed to the property with them.  Unfortunately it’s currently inhabited by Zhuba (Bauyrzhan Kaptagai), the alcoholic brute of a brother to the local police chief (Nurbek Mukushev) who has been living there illegally for the past 10 years.  In this lawless frontier, possession takes precedence over any existing laws, as Zhuba wages an intimidation campaign and beats the crap out of John after he files a complaint with the police, while a visit to the housing ministry only results in the futility of trying to do anything about it, reduced to a portrait of comic absurdity, a throwback to a faceless and heartless Kafkaesque world where reason never prevails, where grievances remain in a state of limbo for months and problems are left to be resolved by hand-to-hand human combat, resorting to a survival of the fittest Darwinian universe where the weak are stomped on by more powerful Stalinist forces.  It’s a bleak and hopeless existence where John eventually gets arrested, where despite the dubious nature of the charges, there are signs that he will never be released, and the younger siblings are forced to survive on their own, where all that is saving them at the moment are Aliya’s charmingly innocent visions.

Duped into signing away ownership of the house, lured by the false promise of John’s freedom, the director likes to line up all the interested parties and shoot them in a tableaux shot where once again they are seen as just actors, where this offers a temporary relief from the descent into oblivion facing this family.  Perhaps part of the problem with this film is a similar one depicted in Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), where the collaborators and perpetrators of the heinous acts of genocide are seen as mere caricatures, lending a cartoonish aura of ridiculousness to their nature that not only influences but overshadows whatever horrors they committed.  This exaggerated comical absurdity overwhelms the grotesque nature of their crimes, where the artificiality of style, expressed through extreme violence and Hollywood dreamlike dance sequences with saturated colors, allows them to portray themselves as fools, where they may hide and take cover within the mysterious ambiguities of artistic presentation, where fiction is as distorted as reality.  The heartlessness of a Stalinist regime is prevalent in both Kazakh and Russian films, where the stone cold rigidity of the system remains intact, even under the authority of a different nationality.  Yerzhanov then abandons any concept of realism and prefers to emphasize the darker more satiric elements of a Kafkaesque society, but in doing so the film makes so many tonal shifts that he loses any visionary claim to authenticity and begins referencing the stylizations of others, from early Kaurismäki to Fellini to Tsai Ming-liang to the comic invention of Wes Anderson, where there’s even a tribute to SCARFACE (1983) and Vincent van Gogh.  While the film never seems to work, the fun is watching it stumble all over itself with clever ideas it really doesn’t know what to do with.  Yerzhanov’s picture of an absurdly decaying system of authority is saturated in an unreal universe that becomes almost too magical, where there is no question that it is a compelling style, but it grows much too absurd.  Does the artistic style of the film equate to emotional truths or human drama, or does it provoke ideas or complex thought?  And while it’s visually quite strong and startlingly unique, there’s some question whether it actually offers anything new.    

Harmony Lessons (Uroki garmonii)

HARMONY LESSONS (Uroki garmonii)        B+                  

Kazakhstan  France  Germany  (115 mi)  2013  d:  Emir Baigazin          Website

Much in the same vein as other darkly disturbing films that expose the deadly effects of systematic violence and corruption, like the Mexican film Heli (2013) or the Russian film The Major (Mayor) (2013), all are brutal films that unleash a horrific price on what are otherwise innocent bystanders who happen to be pulled into this viciously dirty business.  While there don’t seem to be as many mafia movies these days, in their place are a multitude of films about swarming gangs of thugs that control a highly specialized marketplace, as they’re each one a loose commentary on black market capitalism that lives by its own rules, like the Wild West, answering to no law but their own.  Each one survives by inflicting enormous violence, which generates an accompanying fear associated with it, allowing them to continue to operate with impunity.  Until another gang moves in that’s bigger or stronger, they each feed, like vultures on a carcass, within their own established turf.  What could be more localized than the rural regions of Kazakhstan?  Beautifully set in a landscape of mountains and snow, where a vast emptiness seems to dwarf the inhabitants living in the small town, the harshness of survival in these lonely outskirts is expressed early on when young 13-year old Aslan (Timur Aidarbekov, who was discovered in an orphanage) first has to catch a slippery sheep and then slaughter and skin it under the supervision of his grandmother.  Written, directed, and edited by this first time director, he already exhibits a mature style, making a strikingly realist film with nonprofessional actors, yet he uses an interesting technique of skipping past major incidents, where we only learn what happens by the repercussions afterwards, leaving much of what happens in a permanent state of ambiguity. 

Aslan is a quiet and studious farm kid that keeps pretty much to himself, having few social skills and no friends, the kind of kid that doesn’t speak unless spoken to, where he takes his schoolwork seriously and seems to have a talent for science, where he collects cockroaches, tying them on strings and feeding them to his lizards living in a fishbowl, while at the same time he’s learning about survival of the fittest from Darwinism.  When they teach him electricity, he concocts his own tiny electric chair and fries a poor unfortunate roach.  But his reserved, anti-social behavior makes him a popular target for schoolyard bullies, who are little more than extortion artists led by the lead thug Bolat (Aslan Anarbayev), threatening to beat up anyone who is seen talking or befriending Aslan, who quickly becomes isolated and even more of a social outcast.  We soon learn Bolat collects money from lower classmen, which is then handed over to upper classmen, who are in turn extorted by local gangsters, where the money is used to support their members in prison.  This social hierarchy is thoroughly in place, where anyone who doesn’t play by the rules gets attacked and beat up by several of Bolat’s sidekicks.  Another kid that recently moved from the city, Mirsayan (Mukhtar Andassov), isn’t really afraid to stand up to bullies, as he’s not impressed, but he takes his lumps.  There’s also a side story about an attractive young Muslim girl, Akzhan (Anelya Adilbekova), who insists upon wearing a headscarf, even in gym class, as otherwise boys spend too much time leering at her, actions that she feels violates the Koran.  She wants nothing to do with stirring up that kind of desecrating behavior, even though the school officials urge her to remove it.  One of the more curious moments finds Aslan spying on her when she’s performing a modern dance routine, which may all be happening inside his head.     

There’s constant head-butting against authority in this film, as teachers are quick to lecture kids who challenge their authority, which means they’re not listening to the concerns raised by the kids, who often provide them with information they need to hear, but instead they get punished for it.  Similarly, if they go against the grain with Bolat, they’ll be brutalized for anything outside the norm.  Meanwhile both Mirsayan and Aslan have aspirations to defy Bolat, choosing different methods, where Mirsayan is willing to fight him one on one, while Aslan resorts to more devious means.  When Bolat is found dead, an act we never see, they are the prime suspects, where the police instantly fill the void of the schoolyard brutalizers, literally torturing the two kids to force them to talk, but both insist they had nothing to do with it, even after extensive beatings.  At one point one of the cops turns to the other asking what if they’re telling the truth?  But they quickly put those thoughts aside, as they’re paid to get the results the commander is looking for.  Every level of society is bullying whoever is directly below them on the food chain, creating a horrific picture of rampant corruption and brutality in the education, police, and criminal justice systems, where Mirsayan and Aslan are their current victims.  Because the film is told in such a realist style, it comes as a complete surprise when the director uses dream states for Aslan, which only becomes evident by the out-of-character events unfolding, expressed through an exaggerated state of mind.  This method is even more effective by leaving out so much of the significant material, where the audience and the police are only privy to theories and unproven allegations, relying instead upon motive and established character traits, yet it remains something of an elusive puzzle for everyone to comprehend.  Bolat and his gang could only operate with teachers continually turning a blind eye, while the police and their henchmen brutalize suspects with no community oversight.  In this manner, the police have no established credibility with the audience, as we’re not likely to believe their questionable results, leaving the finale in a mysterious state of psychological disbelief, where truth is often difficult to obtain, clouded by the murky methods of operation.  The cinematography by Aziz Zhambakiyev is often stunning, giving the film a grimly poetic yet continually gripping feeling of austerity and despair.