Incendies

Denis Villeneuve

The story: Acting on instructions in their mother Nawal’s will, siblings Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette) try to deliver letters to a father they thought was dead and to an elder brother they did not know they had. They travel to the Middle East to retrace the journey Nawal (Lubna Azabal) took from the land of her birth to Canada and end up uncovering devastating family secrets.

Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies opens with a slap to the face and ends with a punch to the gut.

When siblings Simon and Jeanne find out the contents of their mother’s will, they react with anger and disbelief: Why were they never told about their brother? How can their father be alive? Who is this woman whom they called mother and yet know so little about?

These intensely personal questions anchor the moviegoer’s interest in the story even as a family mystery seems to shift into a political drama.

The tangled politics of Christians versus Muslims and powerful warlords is the incendiary, and sometimes confusing, back story that gradually unfolds. Zeroing in on Nawal’s journey, Villeneuve gives the film a sense of direction and focus.

It is all too easy to be numb to reports of internecine war and the senseless carnage it wreaks.

Here, the devastation is played out in one woman’s fate and in the eyes of the magnetic Azabal, perhaps best known for playing an anti-war activist in the Palestinian film about two friends-turned-suicide bombers in Paradise Now (2005).

She holds court as she ages from a young woman who pays a heavy price for falling in love over her family’s objections to a determined mother tracking down her child as war erupts around her and, finally, to a shell of a woman who is shocked into catatonic silence in her final days.

As the daughter searching for answers and the son who slowly comes to terms with his mother’s past, Desormeaux-Poulin and Gaudette are believable as well.

The ending might seem melodramatic to some but it is entirely plausible within the film and there is an implacable logic to it.

To reveal more would be to rob you of the intense experience of watching the film. Suffice to say the emotional wallop it packs at the end will leave you reeling.

(ST)