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.