Starring: Lubna Azabal, Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin, Maxime Gaudette
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Category: IIB (French, Arabic and English)
It begins with the death of a tortured mother and ends with the appearance of a long-lost father. In between, an enraged son and a mournful daughter discover family secrets as they visit their ancestral land, where the ravages of war have left an indelible mark. Incendies boasts all the hallmarks of a Greek tragedy and Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve has delivered a film with great visual panache, immense pathos and passionate performances from his cast.
The haunting opening sequence - in which militiamen are seen shaving the heads of young and hapless recruits to the sound of Radiohead's You and Whose Army - flags Incendies' epic nature, and offers a cinematic riposte to the Wajdi Mouawad play on which his film is based. But the moment of foreboding arrives about 15 minutes into the film, when a professor is heard welcoming his new students into what he describes as 'the realm of solitude'.
As he speaks, his visibly disturbed teaching assistant Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin) squirms. She is soon to embark on a lone venture to the Middle East, as she attempts to fulfil the wishes of her recently deceased mother, Nawal (Lubna Azabal, above), by finding the father she has never seen, and a brother she never thought existed. As she makes her way through her mother's home country, she discovers her mother is seen as 'a disgrace' by her kin.
It also becomes obvious that a new generation has no memory of the catastrophes that benighted her mother's life - as an indifferent receptionist responds to Jeanne's requests for information with: 'Are you kidding? I wasn't even born then!'
Jeanne's experiences, and then those of her twin brother Simone (Maxime Gaudette) - who grudgingly depart for the Middle East separately to follow the dictates of their mother's will - are seen in parallel to flashbacks of Nawal's tortuous experiences three decades previously. Having become pregnant, the young Nawal tries unsuccessfully to flee her rural home with her boyfriend. After giving birth to a son, she is sent away to the city by her grandmother, who urges her 'to go to school, to learn, to think and to leave this misery'. But it's a road to hell - the city is a vortex of sectarian warfare. Brutal experiences transform Nawal and her decision to join the war sets off a string of tragedies that will leave a scorching hole in the children's perception of themselves 30 years later.