For all its occasional sentimentality, this film is about the link between poverty and anger. It’s a much angrier, tougher – and sometimes funnier – film than you might imagine from its cloying opening premise.
Zain (Zain Alrafeea) is a 12-year-old boy in Beirut, deeply embittered by his poverty, by his parents’ failure to protect him from it and by the desperate and humiliatingly ineffective accommodations they have made to get money. They have effectively sold his beloved 11-year-old sister Samar (Cedra Izam) in marriage to their landlord’s creepy son – an arrangement that is to have a tragic outcome. Zain is now in Lebanon’s notorious Roumieh prison, from which he is launching a lawsuit against his parents, suing them for the fact that he has been born – a legal stunt apparently encouraged by a TV current affairs show as a way of publicising the issue of child poverty.
It is a fundamentally silly, whimsical idea – and doesn’t bode well for the rest of the film. But an extended flashback shows us how Zain came to be in prison in the first place, and that is an arresting story, though director Nadine Labaki (who in fact has a somewhat preposterous cameo as Zain’s lawyer) certainly isn’t shy of pressing the audience’s emotional buttons.
Despite being just 12 years old, Zain has the aggressive, sullen cynicism of someone 20 years older. He is not the enigmatic mute saint that you might normally see in arthouse world cinema dramas about poverty. Zain talks back – incessantly telling “dickheads” to “fuck off”. This contempt applies especially to his harassed parents. They have a scam going to forge prescriptions of Tramadol that can then be smuggled into prison by being crushed into powder, dissolved in hot water in which clothes are washed – and these are brought into jail as innocuous-seeming gifts to inmates. The drug-saturated garments are then boiled up and wrung out, and the liquid is sold as “Tramadol shots” on the inside.
Even Zain, young as he is, can see how grotesque it is, and he resents the demeaning hardship of that and all the other prison scams. Prior to being locked up, the selling of Sahar is the last straw, and he runs away from home, finally making friends with an illegal Ethiopian cleaner, Rahil (Yordanos Shifera), who brings her little baby secretly to work in a shopping trolley – she would be instantly fired if her employers knew she had a child. Zain makes himself useful looking after the baby, and then, when Rahil is picked up by the authorities, Zain effectively becomes the baby’s guardian – sometimes tying him up in the squalid shanty-town where they are staying while he goes off to beg or steal. And there is a sinister people-trafficker, Aspro (Alaa Chouchniye), who offers him $500 for the baby, theoretically for a rich childless couple. Will Zain wind up cutting exactly the same putrid deal that he despised his parents for making?
There are entertaining interludes – Rahil has to enlist the help of a very eccentric local man who dresses up as Spider-Man to pose as her employer, so that she can have the correct papers. But basically this is a grim, chaotic world in which Zain lost his innocence long ago and became an aggressive adult criminal. As for the title, it refers to the town on the Sea of Galilee where Jesus was supposed to have taught in the synagogue and healed the sick – the parallel between Jesus’s precocity and that of Zain is certainly ironic. It’s a simplistic film in some ways, with a naive ending – but there is energy and vigour, too.
