Denis Villeneuve/ Canada/France / 2010/ 130 min / N/C 15+
Showing as part of the Glasgow Film Festival @ Cineworld, 18th -19th & 22nd -23rd Feb
This Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film is an exceptionally powerful and moving epic, set amidst the chaos of Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war. Quebecois twenty-something twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) attend the reading of their mother Nawal’s (Lubna Azabal) will, which includes some bizarre instructions involving her burial and the delivery of sealed letters to their father and brother. That their father is still alive and that they have a brother at is news to the twins, and the instructions are met with skepticism by Simon, but are the catalyst to Jeanne’s voyage to Nawal’s home country of Lebanon to deliver the missive. We follow her journey as she uncovers the mysteries of her enigmatic mother’s past, while, in parallel flashbacks, we follow Nawal’s own story, from an illegitimate pregnancy as a young woman, to her involvement in Lebanon’s bloody conflict.
Visually stunning, using stark Jordanian locations to stand in for Lebanon, Incendies is a masterful piece of cinematic storytelling, which uses what is essentially a mystery yarn as a vehicle to capture the pains and hypocrisies of civil war and sectarian conflict. There are no saints or heroes in this film, merely recognisable human beings doing unspeakable things in extreme circumstances. The intriguing omission of country names (Lebanon, though utterly recognisable, is never called by name; the Israelis are referred to as “the aggressors” and Palestinian refugees merely as “refugees”) could be perceived in some quarters as a fudge, erasing the international and factual dimensions of Lebanon’s civil war. But it works as a way to use fiction to negotiate a path through the contested truths of the warring sides, revealing fundamental, human truths that will resonate universally. Incendies is a powerful reminder of how those that survive civil war are not always mere victims or inhuman monsters, and must live on both with themselves and with other perpetrators.