Incendies, in cinemas from Thursday, is one of the great cinematic experiences of the year.
Incendies
If you go to Incendies, I will buy you ice cream. I will fly you around the world. No, actually I won’t; but it will feel as though I have. You’ll want to thank me.
Or possibly not. It’s not the jolliest thing to watch. An early line of dialogue: “Childhood is a knife stuck in your throat. It can’t easily be removed.” And a note I wrote to myself sometime late in the first hour: “Not one character has smiled yet.”
The film is intense, severe and so finely balanced on the edge of a precipitous fall into terrible knowledge that there’s very little I can say about it without saying too much. But it’s one of the great experiences your local cinema has to offer you this year, and it will haunt you.
The film opens in darkness: a long-held black screen pause during which the small crowd I saw it with fell absolutely silent. So many directors know how to use noise, but give me one who understands the power of silence. The camera fades up on to a wide landscape of desolate hills, and slowly pulls back until we realise we’re looking through a window. The camera pans round the room. A slow, restless music creeps into the scene (Radiohead’s You and Whose Army?, never better deployed) and begins meandering towards a surging climax. The room is full of dead-faced children, standing patiently as two adults shave their heads, and as the music crests, the camera zooms in relentlessly on one boy’s face. He stares at us with the most unnerving expression. It means something, and there’s no knowing what. Closer in, and closer in: such extraordinary eyes the boy has. And cut.
A more powerfully cinematic opening would be hard to find. Incendies – the word means “conflagrations” – was originally a stage play by Montreal playwright Wajdi Mouawad, and you can detect that after the fact, when you reflect on its tightly coiled dramatic structure. But director and screenwriter Denis Villeneuve has achieved a complete reimagining of Mouawad’s story, adapting it in the rare, most extreme sense: stripping it down to its essentials and reconstructing it to play to its new medium’s strengths.
The second scene introduces us to an adult brother and sister, twins, whose mother has just died: we meet them at the reading of her will. Their mother, we gather, was a difficult person, and her will contains an unpleasant surprise: she will not permit herself a proper burial or headstone until the twins track down her missing older son. This is the first the twins have heard of him. They have grown up in Canada, but Jeanne, the sister (Mélissa Désormeaux Poulin), flies to the Middle East to look for their mother’s birth village, in a fictionalised country clearly based on Lebanon.
From here the film unspools in two strands, following the twins’ mother, Nawal (the extraordinary Lubna Azabal), in flashback, and Jeanne, as she attempts to piece together Nawal’s story. We learn quickly, and Jeanne slowly, that Nawal was involved in the long-running civil war in the area: perhaps very involved. Some of the scenes by which this information reaches us are deeply shocking – not all the conflagrations of the title are metaphorical – although the violence is never gratuitous or particularly explicit. Villeneuve wants us to understand the hopelessly tangled reciprocity of vengeance that governs the region’s realpolitik, so we can understand the difficulty of forgiveness: which is very much at the heart of the quest Nawal has imposed on her children.
Some reviews have compared Incendies to Greek tragedy. That conveys the pitch of highly charged drama to which the film raises a story that might have seemed merely contrived in clumsier hands, but it misses something vital: this is not a tragedy. Or not simply. Profoundly well crafted and profoundly moving, it’s about the way violence perpetuates itself, and about the courage required to break the cycle.
INCENDIES, directed by Denis Villeneuve.
David Larsen’s film blog is Romeo Must Not Live.