Incendies

Susan Granger’s review of “Incendies” (Sony Pictures Classics)

 

    Based on Wajdi Mouawad’s celebrated play, this compelling, Oscar-nominated film from France interweaves two parallel stories.  After a brief prologue in a desert village in which young boys’ heads are shaved, the story begins as Montreal notary Lebel (Remy Girard) summons adult twins Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Melissa Desormeaux Poulin, Maxim Gaudette) to hear their recently deceased mother Nawal’s Will.  They receive a pair of letters to deliver – one for the father they thought was dead and the other for a brother they never knew existed – before they can open a final message and erect a headstone in her honor.

    While skeptical Simon is not as interested in this posthumous mystery, his mathematician sister Jeanne is intrigued. With Lebel’s help, she is able to unearth hidden family secrets as they travel to their mother’s fictionalized homeland (think Lebanon) to try to locate their father and their ‘lost’ brother whom they can only identify by the three black dots their mother had tattooed on his ankle.  During the 1970s, they discover that their then-teenage mother Nawal (Lubna Azabal) was caught in the middle of the bitter 15-year civil war between Christians and Muslims. While she was a Christian, her life was intimately intertwined with the Muslim community, involving harrowing atrocities, imprisonment and a Middle Eastern “Sophie’s Choice,” before she emigrated to Canada.

    Quebecois writer/director Denis Villeneuve effectively blends the past and present, punctuating the occasionally muddled, melancholy drama with a mournful Radiohead song that’s well suited to the underlying violence-begets-violence theme. On the other hand, the film could use some judicious editing and there’s no question that the concluding revelation seems overly contrived. Melissa Desormeaux Poulin, Maxim Gaudette and the Belgian actress Lubna Azabal deliver memorable performances, propelling the incendiary narrative which, translated, means “scorched” or “burned.”

    In French with English subtitles, on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Incendies” is an imaginative, illuminating 7, demonstrating, once again, that children often have no idea about what went on in their parents’ lives during the many formative years before they were born.

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