Incendies (2010)

 

                    “Incendies” is a Canadian film directed and written by Denis Villeneuve.  He was inspired to adapt the play by Wajdi Mouawad.  The title is French for fire or conflagration, an appropriate title for a story that is set in a civil war.  Although the setting and characters are fictional, it is most likely based on the Lebanese Civil War.  The movie was filmed mostly in Montreal, with a few days spent in Jordan.  It took only 40 days to finish.  The completed film was a highlight of numerous festivals and got great reviews.  It won eight Genies (the Canadian equivalent of the Oscar), including Best Motion Picture, Director, and Actress (Lubna Azabal).  It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.

                    The movie catches your attention immediately with a scene where soldiers are shorn of their locks.  It’s a scenario common in every war movie with a boot camp section, but here the “soldiers” are boys.  The scene closes with a defiant look from a boy who has three dots tattooed on his ankle.  Who is this boy?  The mystery begins.  Fast forward to years later.  Twins Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) are in the office of a notary for the reading of their mother’s will in Canada.  She left a letter expressing an unfulfilled promise to find her son who she had put in an orphanage back in the old country. She wants them to find their brother. And while they are at it, find their father, too.  Simon thinks the idea is daft, like his mother.  He just wants to bury her and be done with it.  Jeanne insists on traveling to the Middle East to initiate a search.  By the end of the movie, you may think Simon was right to let sleeping dogs lie.  The notary, their mother’s employer and friend of the family, warns them that “death is never the end.  It leaves tracks.”  Those tracks are going to take the twins to an unforeseen explanation for their mother’s strange behavior and her enigmatic last words.  I won’t spoil the rest of the plot because it is a movie that rewards people who enjoy mysteries and plot twists. 

                    The film has a nonlinear structure.  The first half intercuts Jeanne’s journey to find her brother with flash backs to her mother Jawal’s (Azabal) experiences during the civil war.  And boy did she have some experiences, mostly tragic.  She spends fifteen years in prison and becomes famous as “the woman who sings”.  The second half has Simon reluctantly joining his sister to search for his father.  The revelations they uncover are going to rock their world.

                    “Incendies” is a remarkable movie.  I’m always intrigued by war movies that go outside the box.  In this case, it is a mystery set in a war.  Appropriately, the war is a civil war.  That means Nawal’s odyssey is made more tragic by the internecine nature of that type of war.  Made worse by the religious factor that the Middle East is infamous for.  Christians versus Muslims will recur throughout Nawal’s story.  This is particularly evident in a scene where Christian militiamen stop a bus full of Muslims.  Because what happens is realistic, it is one of the harshest scenes you will find, even in a war movie.  Speaking of realism, while its depiction of the brutality of a civil war is true, the dominoes that have to fall to reach the shocking conclusion are open to nit-picking.  But if you get fixated on the odds of plot developments, you’ll miss the point of a very entertaining movie. 

GRADE  =  A