#feat. nadine as boyle probably

[marissa-writes]

Rereading Harry Potter has just made me want Calliot to have a plot like the episode of Brooklyn 99 with the crossword guy, but instead of the crossword guy, it's a guy about to get drafted for the Chudley Cannons.

#greenhairedtomato #s: calliot #they arent really jake and amy but idk it seemed like them #the slight jealousy and the acknowledgment of the jealousy idk #feat. nadine as boyle probably #i miss my ships

[pigballoon]

Capernaum

(Nadine Labaki, 2018)

With her third feature as director, Nadine Labaki tackles a feature that from the reading of a brief synopsis, or listening to the easy summation upon which the movie is being sold might sound like some kind of courtroom drama, but she instead uses said judicial scenes as her framing device around which to build a story that can probably most easily (and stupidly) be summed up as Slumdog Millionaire meets Breaking Bad.

Of course to compare it to Danny Boyle's Oscar winning effort is a major insult, it can maybe be more closely compared to the first half of Garth Davis' Lion, it's a film that captures the true horror and hardship of life in squalor, or struggling to exist on the streets. The Breaking Bad quality comes from introducing us to our central character who'll lead us through this 2+ hour sprawling odyssey of suffering as the unashamed committer of a significant crime facing time in incarceration, and then flashing back to tell the story of how he came to do what he did, be where he is, and attempt what he is attempting. 

The heart of Capernaum is in the story, the struggling to survive day to day on the streets of Lebanon, how this boy fights to stay above water with no significant light at the end of the tunnel, but it's the brain of the movie that makes it special, by presenting us first with this endpoint so that we know he'll make it out, Capernaum becomes less about the how and more about the why, which immediately makes it a more interesting experience to behold rather than a simple case of wallowing in squalor.

Of course Labaki's real masterstroke here is the casting of the central role. Zain Al Rafeea was an illiterate Syrian refugee living in Lebanon, but what he also turns out to be is a full blown movie star. The kid has got a confident swagger on screen totally at odds with his inexperience, an attitude about him that makes him absolutely enthralling to behold. There is an aggression and angst about the character absolutely essential to a child of such an age in such a situation, but a faultless tenderness about him in certain scenes that layers the character tremendously and rounds him out in a way essential for him to keep you on side. Finding such a boy is no small feat, and were it not for him there is very little chance that such a long, harrowing movie would work anywhere near as well as it does. 

Labaki surrounds him with a host of other non professional performers, most notably Kawthar Al Haddad and Fadi Kamel Youssef as the parents whose performances make it impossible to make it easy to root for one side or the other and Yordanos Shiferaw as the woman who takes him in when he runs away from home. To watch them you would never know they weren't seasoned professionals, because every one of them is brilliant, and betrays no hint of a lie anywhere along the line.

Beyond that remarkable skill at finding actors the way she shoots this thing, handheld, often in stifling close up, drops you right there in the middle of everything, there is an often observational style to some of these scenes, less interest shown in dialogue driven, plot progression, more just in following, watching these characters existing in their world, the scenes in the court room the only ones where anything resembling exposition rarely rears its head, but even when it does it’s done in a fashion that makes it seems as natural as possible.

It's a tremendously pieced together exercise - cinematic, emotionally involving, finding humour in amidst the darkness to take the edge off. It is a story of chaos, and the aesthetic style brilliantly embodies that, but it's all done in the most professional, effortless way imaginable. Labaki finding the way to create the horrors of such an existence as evocatively as possible in narrative cinema while working the details in such a way that keep from making it a horror to sit through as an audience.

#capernaum #nadine labaki #zain al rafeea #kawthar al haddad #fadi kamel youssef #yordanos shiferaw #2018 #reviews #film #films #movie #movies #lebanon #lebanese #foreign #foreign language