Recensioni de* critic*

Man hands on misery to man at an astonishing rate in Nadine Labaki’s righteously angry slum-survival melodrama.

Labaki’s ability with these non-professional actors, including the baby, is remarkable.

Labaki’s greatest achievement may be that she made a beautifully crafted film with such a deep understanding for her untrained actors that it’s nearly impossible to tear our eyes from the screen or forget what we’ve witnessed.

If the plot mechanics are somewhat flimsy it hardly matters, because such a powerful gravitational center is provided by the protagonist, Zain, a boy of around 12 played with electrifying toughness, hurt, and grace by Syrian refugee Zain al-Rafeea.

With a journalistic ardor for detail that sometimes outweighs the drama, Labaki depicts underworld barbarity, official indifference, and the crushing weight of traditional misogyny through Zain’s ferociously intelligent, deeply principled perspective.

“Capernaum,” Nadine Labaki’s hectic and heartbreaking new film, borrows its name from an ancient city condemned to hell, according to the Book of Matthew, by Jesus himself. The word has since become a synonym for chaos, and modern Beirut as captured by Ms. Labaki’s camera is a teeming vision of the inferno, a place without peace, mercy or order.

It seems churlish to find fault with Capernaum, which certainly must be given credit for exposing a side of life that most viewers will never witness. It mixes humor and pathos with a deft hand and is undoubtedly entertaining and thought-provoking. Yet there are moments when the film’s effort to tug at our heartstrings seems a bit too obvious and overdone.

Poverty porn at its most shameless, Nadine Labaki’s paean to Beirut’s street urchins charmed a number of viewers when it was screened in this year’s Cannes Competition; one can only conclude that otherwise reasonable critics are reduced to quivering sentimentalists when plied with images of adorable children and babies.

Hopefully Labaki will do away with the heavy-handed music and allow the extraordinary performance by Zain Al Rafeea, as a 12-year-old runaway who sues his parents for bringing him into the world, to compel hearts and minds.

I’ve managed to forget most of the dirty details of Nadine Labaki’s poverty bukkake, but the pseudo-neorealist elements most certainly included two extremely precocious abandoned children, a snowballing accrual of misery, and something about life not being worth living on the streets for parents and children alike.

A passion project, Capharnäumsuffers, if anything, from too much of it (passion, that is): Labaki tries to insert so many social issues into the film that she finds it difficult to maintain a focus on any one of them.

The story is carried by Zain’s practical-minded efforts to survive; his resourcefulness, not to mention his twisted sense of right and wrong, can be quite gripping. Labaki has done her homework, and the film carries a tough-minded authenticity.