Capernaum · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch the boy move the baby. Zain has no stroller and no money, so he lashes a cooking pot to a length of board, sets the infant Yonas inside it, and hauls him through Beirut on a rope, the wheels catching on every lip of broken pavement. It is one of the most inventive images in recent cinema, and also one of the most ordinary: a small body made responsible for a smaller one, dragging it through a city built for neither of them. Hold onto that pot-and-rope. Almost everything Nadine Labaki is doing runs through it.

Classical movie storytelling rests on a simple circuit. A character perceives a situation, and acts to change it, and the action resolves the situation — the chain that Deleuze called the action-image. Zain is, by any measure, a brilliant little agent. He hustles, lies, mixes tramadol into water to sell, improvises shelter, keeps an infant alive for weeks. He never stops acting. And none of it bends the world an inch. The pot still has no wheels worth the name; the baby still has nowhere to go. This is precisely what Deleuze named the crisis of the action-image: the link between perception and effective action goes slack, so that a person can see everything and do everything and still change nothing. Labaki's film is one long demonstration that resourcefulness is not the same as power.

Because the action can't resolve, the plot stops behaving like a plot. Zain moves through the city picking up and losing companions, driven less by dramatic cause-and-effect than by the next meal, the next hiding place. Deleuze had a name for this shape too — the voyage or balade, the trip that transforms nothing. The picaresque drift here isn't loose writing; it's the film's argument made structural. And the places he drifts through have been stripped of the function that would make them settings: a drainage pipe, a rooftop of scavenged corrugated iron, a stairwell. These are any-spaces-whatever — spaces emptied of their use, registering pure deprivation rather than serving any action staged inside them. Christopher Aoun shoots most of it from Zain's eyeline or below it, so the adult world arrives the way a child meets it, by instinct, from underneath.

Now the lawsuit. A twelve-year-old sues his parents for the crime of having given him life. As statute it is nonsense, and Labaki knows it; the courtroom premise is sound only as feeling. Here is her real invention. Neorealism gave us the child as witness to adult humiliation — De Sica's boy watching his father in Bicycle Thieves, the carceral machinery grinding children in Shoeshine. Labaki takes that child and turns him from witness into plaintiff. The act Zain cannot perform on the world — fix it, escape it — gets transposed into an address to an institution. Deleuze would call the courtroom scenes a discourse-image: the film poses a problem it has no power to resolve, and stages the posing itself. The trial doesn't answer the question of Zain's life. It makes the question sayable.

And in saying it, Zain does something stranger than testify. He invents himself into existence. He has no papers, no birth certificate, no proof he was ever born — like Rahil the undocumented migrant, like thousands the film catalogues, he belongs to a class the state cannot see. Deleuze, writing on modern political cinema, said its subject is the moment when a people are missing — when the political has to pass through the absence of any constituted people to speak for. Capernaum is full of the missing: stateless, undocumented, uncounted. What Zain does on the stand is fabulation — the subject caught in the act of legending himself, telling his own existence into being because no document will do it for him. The film and its making fold together here: Zain Al Rafeea was himself a Syrian refugee without papers, and the camera neither fully adopts his view nor floats above it but fuses with him, a free-indirect vision that speaks with the child rather than for him.

Laure Gardette's editing trusts this. Her cuts land on faces, not actions — on Yonas at dusk, on Zain's guarded, furious watchfulness — reading for emotional residue when the plot has nowhere to advance. These are affection-images in the oldest sense, a feeling registered and held, refusing to discharge into the rescue the classical cut would have promised.

The lineage is exact. The non-professional cast drawn from the depicted stratum comes from Shoeshine and Salaam Bombay!; the child-eyeline grammar from Bicycle Thieves; the method of handing non-actors scenarios instead of lines from Loach's Kes; the handheld camera as a form of moral accountability for the undocumented from the Dardennes' La Promesse. What Capernaum seeded, in turn, was the humanitarian film of the late 2010s, arriving inside the Syrian refugee crisis with a reach Netflix carried far past the arthouse.

The risk in all this is obvious, and worth naming: a film that makes real suffering legible can also make it consumable. Capernaum survives the charge because it never lets the action resolve into uplift. Watch the pot and the rope again. The boy is doing everything right. The wheels still catch on every crack. That gap — between a child's total competence and a world that will not be moved — is the whole film, and Deleuze gives you the words for why it cannot close.