Look/Listen

Violent trauma and the bloody pulping that it inflicts on the human psyche are prominent concerns of Québécois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve (August 32 on Earth, Maelström, Polytechnique). The director’s new feature film, Incendies, tackles such matters with a ghastly, globetrotting tale of distinctly Dickensian character. Adapted from Scorched, the celebrated play by Lebanese-Canadian director and author Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies leads its protagonists—and the audience—through a mystery that spans continents and decades. The shockwaves of dissolute political and religious movements describe the contours of this mystery, but the puzzle’s perverse endpoint is cruelly personal: the film concludes in a twist that is both emotionally brutalizing and fairly ridiculous. Yet Incendies succeeds despite the mounting absurdities of its plot, principally because of the film’s aptly grave treatment of violence and absolution, as well as Villeneuve’s appealing stylistic choices.

The film’s action weaves together both the unsettled present and harrowing past. The first narrative unfolds in contemporary Quebec, with the sudden death of Nawal (Lubna Azabal), a sixty-something Arabic woman with an obscure past. Her adult fraternal twin children, Jeanne (Mélissa Désomezu-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) are each provided with a sealed envelope and a guilt-wracked, posthumous appeal from their mother. Jeanne is exhorted to locate their father, who the siblings assumed was dead, and present him with the envelope. Simon is urged to do likewise with their older brother, who the twins were not aware existed. The resentful Simon disregards what he sees as a mad request, but Jeanne hastily sets off for an unspecified Middle Eastern nation to follow a meager trail of clues, despite her lack of contacts and ignorance of the local tongue.

The second narrative emerges from Jeanne’s quest, as extensive flashbacks gradually reveal the events of Nawal’s shattered life in the twenty or so years before her flight to Canada. Her homeland is never named within the film, although the violent Christian-Muslim antagonism that distinguishes her experiences suggest a fictionalized Lebanon. Those experiences comprise a catalogue of catastrophes and sins: doomed love, missing children, civil war, massacres, terrorism, and much worse. Villeneuve cuts back and forth between Nawal’s historical tribulations and the wanderings of the resolute, bewildered Jeanne (and, eventually, Simon) in the present day. Intertitles in bold block red letters often signal these switches in the timeframe. In other instances, however, the shift is seamless, leaving the viewer briefly disoriented as to when exactly events are occurring. Fittingly, the sun-baked, hardscrabble landscape and stifling interior spaces offer no telltale signs as to the precise year, blurring past and present and highlighting the film’s plus ça change outlook.

Incendies’ most off-putting missteps are its accumulating luridness and diminishing plausibility. Nawal’s plight encompasses so many debacles, escapes, and chance encounters that the plot eventually acquires the whiff of cartoonish improbability. This effect culminates in the final revelation, which is admittedly shocking, but so ludicrous and riddled with nagging questions that the emotional potency of the moment is dampened. Squint a little and one can discern the outline of a vicious Oliver Twist doppelganger, where the moralistic syrup has been drained away and replaced with bile.

That said, the film fortunately never descends into exploitative miserablism, due in part to Villeneuve’s engaging and harshly realist style, as well as his rigorous commitment to his characters. The director is plainly fascinated with their reactions and their moral life, such that eliciting outraged gasps from his audience barely registers as a priority. Accordingly, Incendies remains admirably grounded within the world of its story, which might be over-the-top at times, but never devolves into a didactic fable. The film’s queries emerge seamlessly from its sober portrayal of bloodshed and hatred, urging the viewer to scrutinize the characters’ choices, judge the worth of those choices, and ponder the alternatives. The result is a pointed thesis on forgiveness at both the personal and global scales, which also functions as an engrossing and credible work of drama.