This my be the best political film I’ve ever seen. It’s Bunuel’s classic Los Olvidados (1950) on steroids. Of course, it’s not about politics. But its every fiber arouses fury at the political systems that enable such hell on earth.
In Lebanon a 12-year-old Syrian refugee boy Zain is serving a five-year jail sentence for stabbing the adult man who married and fatally impregnated the boy’s 11-year-old sister. Their parents forced her into marriage.
Now Zain is suing his parents for bringing him into a life in which they could not provide for or protect him. He’s prompted by his mother’s proud announcement that she’s pregnant again, adding to her innumerable horde of children, all unregistered, unfed, uneducated, the disdained doomed.
The trial scenes are intercut with the events that led up to it. His father expels Zain for interfering with his sister being sold into marriage. The boy finds refuge with an illegal Somali refugee Rahil. He tends to her infant son Yonas while she works. When Rahil is arrested for her lapsed ID Zain struggles to care for Yonas. He’s ultimately forced to let a Lebanese trafficker sell the baby.
For 126 minutes the film displays a gripping sweep of suffering. There is not a moment of drag or boredom. The cityscape looks like a giant warehouse crammed with storage boxes. This is a city with no visible humanity.
There is little evidence of any living creatures enjoying any life. The humans we meet are locked into either selfish or desperate improvisations of escape and exploitation. All the actors are unprofessionals living out variations on real experience. If the merciful happy ending seems a bit miraculous, thus witnessing these people’ suffering has earned us that relief.
The film has images and situations we haven’t seen before. In one, Zain draws on his unsteady experience and observation to teach his sister how to deal with her first period. He wants her to conceal it so her parents won’t sell her into marriage.
When Zane is forced to steal a bottle of milk from a sleeping baby, Ionas tastes and refuses it, then drops off — it’s been drugged. Even the less suffering have their afflictions and desperation.
When Rahil is under arrest, she begs her absent baby’s forgiveness when she milks herself in her jail cell, to relieve the pressure. This entire drama serves up the milk of human unkindness.
In court Zain’s parents are allowed their moments of sympathy. Unregistered, unacknowledged, helpless and hopeless, they're resigned to perpetuating their suffering. Neither knows the simplest self-respect at even the thin end of the spectrum of white privilege. “We’re ants,” says the father, so why let Zain go to school when he could be working for the man who will wed and waste the girl.
Of course this Lebanon story speaks to the suffering and torment throughout the world’s third world countries, the disenfranchised and the despairing, to which Donald Trump’s attack on refugees and asylum seekers has also plunged America.
The film’s title means Chaos. But make no mistake: this film is not about the apparent chaos. It’s about the World Order so uncaring for the world’s suffering as to nourish that chaos.
Two recent news items shadowed my consideration of this film.
(i) Hundreds of millions of dollars have been offered to help the penurious Catholic Church restore its infernal Notre Dame cathedral. Right. Build the edifice and ignore the suffering. That’s what Jesus would say. Let a symbol override humanity. Perhaps the charred cathedral should be left as is, its broken spire an earned emblem of the religion's failure in aspiration and inspiration both. When the symbol smothers the spirit bury the symbol.
(ii)Disney CEO Bob Iger’s salary was $65.6 million in 2018. Disney would not make this movie. And that paled beside Discovery CEO David Zaslaw’s one-year salary of $129.4 million. Those are one year salaries.
This is the World Order. This callousness sustains the chaos this film exposes so heart-rendingly
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