Incendies
(In French with English subtitles)
Starring: Lubna Azabal, Melissa Desourmeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette
Directed by: Denis Villeneuve
Parental guide: adult themes, violence, sexual content, not suitable for children
Running time: 130 minutes
Rating: Four stars out of five
``Sometimes it's better not to know the truth,'' someone says in Incendies, Denis Villeneuve's devastating family drama, and by the end of this brilliant and disturbing movie, you come to feel that he might be right. Incendies - the English title is Scorched - is about a twin brother and sister hunting for the secrets of their family, and what they find is at once horrifying, contrived, moving and impossible: a Greek tragedy transplanted to the Middle East, where tragedies of every provenance have been known to bloom.
Incendies - which has been nominated for a best foreign-language-film Oscar - is the story of two searches. In the first, which takes place 35 years ago, a woman named Nawal (Belgian actress Lubna Azabal, giving a performance of deep and sad watchfulness) is wandering through an unnamed country, looking for her son. It's a place of bombed-out stone villages and perilous desert tracks: The signature scene, used in the film's poster, shows Nawal on her knees in the sand while a bus explodes into flames behind her.
The second story takes place today. Nawal's daughter Jeanne (Melissa Desourmeaux-Poulin), who was raised in Canada, is back in the Middle East, looking for the history of her family. The actresses look so much alike, we're sometimes lost in time as Jeanne retraces Nawal's tracks, and you wonder if Villeneuve ever considered using the same performer for both. The stories of Jeanne and Nawal curl around one another like the strands of a DNA molecule, although the exact nature of the beast it comes from - political terror, family anguish, the very nature of violence - is never made explicit.
Incendies begins as a similar puzzle. First we're in some kind of school where - to the sound of Radiohead's You and Whose Army - young children are having their heads shaved by men in army uniforms. One of them looks up with a terrifying expression, the hooded eyes of lost hope. We move to the Montreal office of a lawyer (Remy Girard), where Jeanne and her twin brother Simon (Maxim Gaudette) are listening to the provisions of Nawal's will.
Her final testament is chilling. She wants to be buried naked, with no casket, face down, so that her eyes will be turned away from the world. The reasons for her bitterness are sealed in two envelopes, one for each child. They are to be delivered to their father, who they have been told is dead, and their brother, of whom they have never heard. The delivery will fulfil a promise.
The will angers Simon, who says it's just another of her mother's mad ideas: Simon serves the story mostly as a mirror, a man whose reactions we can use to discern what kind of mother Nawal was. However, Jeanne heads to off to the unnamed country with a photograph of her mother and the names of a few people who might help her in finding her wayward family.
The journey into the past becomes a trek through a nation where Christians and Muslims were involved in a ruthless civil war (the country in question is probably Lebanon, birthplace of Wajdi Mouawad, who wrote the play on which Incendies is based). Photographed with frightening realism by Andre Turpin, it is a place of shadows and starkness, uncompromising in its beauty and its menace. Jeanne goes from a small village of wounded honour to the abandoned shell of a frightening prison: Nawal's story unfolds all around her until she learns - as all children will - of the unknown lives her parents lived in the world that existed before she was born.(In French with English subtitles)
Starring: Lubna Azabal, Melissa Desourmeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette
Directed by: Denis Villeneuve
Parental guide: adult themes, violence, sexual content, not suitable for children
Running time: 130 minutes
Rating: Four stars out of five
``Sometimes it's better not to know the truth,'' someone says in Incendies, Denis Villeneuve's devastating family drama, and by the end of this brilliant and disturbing movie, you come to feel that he might be right. Incendies - the English title is Scorched - is about a twin brother and sister hunting for the secrets of their family, and what they find is at once horrifying, contrived, moving and impossible: a Greek tragedy transplanted to the Middle East, where tragedies of every provenance have been known to bloom.
Incendies - which has been nominated for a best foreign-language-film Oscar - is the story of two searches. In the first, which takes place 35 years ago, a woman named Nawal (Belgian actress Lubna Azabal, giving a performance of deep and sad watchfulness) is wandering through an unnamed country, looking for her son. It's a place of bombed-out stone villages and perilous desert tracks: The signature scene, used in the film's poster, shows Nawal on her knees in the sand while a bus explodes into flames behind her.
The second story takes place today. Nawal's daughter Jeanne (Melissa Desourmeaux-Poulin), who was raised in Canada, is back in the Middle East, looking for the history of her family. The actresses look so much alike, we're sometimes lost in time as Jeanne retraces Nawal's tracks, and you wonder if Villeneuve ever considered using the same performer for both. The stories of Jeanne and Nawal curl around one another like the strands of a DNA molecule, although the exact nature of the beast it comes from - political terror, family anguish, the very nature of violence - is never made explicit.
Incendies begins as a similar puzzle. First we're in some kind of school where - to the sound of Radiohead's You and Whose Army - young children are having their heads shaved by men in army uniforms. One of them looks up with a terrifying expression, the hooded eyes of lost hope. We move to the Montreal office of a lawyer (Remy Girard), where Jeanne and her twin brother Simon (Maxim Gaudette) are listening to the provisions of Nawal's will.
Her final testament is chilling. She wants to be buried naked, with no casket, face down, so that her eyes will be turned away from the world. The reasons for her bitterness are sealed in two envelopes, one for each child. They are to be delivered to their father, who they have been told is dead, and their brother, of whom they have never heard. The delivery will fulfil a promise.
The will angers Simon, who says it's just another of her mother's mad ideas: Simon serves the story mostly as a mirror, a man whose reactions we can use to discern what kind of mother Nawal was. However, Jeanne heads to off to the unnamed country with a photograph of her mother and the names of a few people who might help her in finding her wayward family.
Incendies is not perfect. Its dark secrets eventually feel imposed on the story, put together for theatrical purposes rather than from life. But its scheme is haunting. ``Death is never the end of the story,'' the attorney says. ``It leaves traces.'' Incendies is that record, and Villeneuve crafts it with a spooky immediacy, fulfilling the promise he showed in Polytechnique as a filmmaker unafraid to look into the corners of violence to find the humanity that created it.
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