Capernaum (Nadine Labaki, 2018)

With all the positive reviews surrounding this and the non-stop praise this was garnering, I was really looking forward to this but turns out not only was this a major disappointment but by the end I was pretty angry at the movie.

The very nature of the genre is exploitative, yes, but here it's taken up a notch by using the suffering of the unfortunate circumstances of the people torn apart from the civil war as a vehicle to propagate very dangerous ideas that have been the upper-class dog-whistles towards poor people for centuries. 

Capernaum is also as manipulative as it can get with using melodramatic score and montages of poor surroundings which mainly boils down to using poverty as an aesthetic choice rather than telling the stories of these people. There is no nuance or depth in its portrayal of either Zain's life or Rahil's and it's just so hopelessly shallow by pandering the subject matter to upper-class audience. The movie doesn't warrant any discourse on the topic nor does it ask any questions about why the characters find themselves in those reprehensible situations. 

The problem deepens with the incredibly self-indulgent part of Nadine Labaki who inserts herself as the moral compass of her own movie, reeking of white saviour complex while never being critical of the class she belongs to, the ones that were never really impacted by the civil war and the ones that were accomplices in creating the aforementioned situation. 

I can't help but see the contrast in how Labaki uses the people's lives to further her agenda while looking at Pedro Costa's filmography where he makes himself invisible by giving voice to the people and letting them tell their story. 

The horrendous use of eugenics in the final monologue to justify that only poor people are in the wrong here rather than criticising the system that led to their situation is a cherry on top of an already cake full of tone-deafness. 

The only pro I can think of is the incredibly moving performance by Zain and the fact that this movie helped him to get a better life, but other than that what a major letdown this movie was.