17 Aug 2011

Incendies

A war film that isn’t about the horrors of war, Incendies is a good old-fashioned mystery thriller.

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Screenplay: Denis Villeneuve, Valerie Beaugrand-Champagne; based on the novel Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad

Cast: Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girard, Allen Altman

Language: French with English subtitles

Awards: 31st Genie Awards: Best Motion Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay

I admit that I’ve been jaded about the horrors of war. Good intentioned films made by shrill liberals (Blood Diamond, Africa United) either hammer you on the head or sugar coat the truth about war. Either way, they want to peddle to you the white man’s guilt that they’re very addicted to in their sadomasochistic way. Admittedly this makes for a good documentary but poor storytelling.

Incendies takes on the horrors of war through a more convoluted route. A dying Arab Christian woman in Canada writes a will that throws the comfortable middle-class lives of her twin children into chaos. From beyond the grave (or through the medium of a public notary), she mentions of a father and a brother they never knew and entreats everyone to find them in their homeland of Lebanon or her soul will never rest in peace. The film then alternates between their mother’s past life in Lebanon and the reluctant twins’ search for a truth they may not want to know and may never be ready to accept. With every chapter, surprising truths are revealed and more tantalising questions are raised.

Readers should be able to recognise the Citizen Kane structure of the film by this stage of my review. Perhaps because there are higher stakes involved in the telling of this story, one may come across with the impression that Incendies might well be the better film of the two.

The writer-director doesn’t care to slowly reveal the ravages and horrors of war – that would have far less impact given what we know about war anyway. Instead, the script slowly unveils the tragic circumstances of the Lebanese Civil War, a story that quite a few members in the audience will otherwise reject out of hand because the nominally Christian faction were as much belligerent gangs of armed bullies as the other factions. But by the time the tale is told and the truth is out, we cannot but empathise and commiserate with the victims as much as the monsters.

This sensitively told and well-crafted film deserves all the awards it was nominated for and won last year.