Denis Villeneuve (2010)
BFI is running a ‘Denis Villeneuve: The Path to Dune’ season, ahead of the release of his new adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel(s). This path has taken Villeneuve from Quebec to Hollywood, stumbling with Prisoners (2013) and Sicario (2015), making progress with Arrival (2016). Incendies, my introduction to his French-Canadian work, is different class from any of these US-made pictures[1]. The source material is a 2003 stage play of the same name by the Lebanese-Canadian Wajdi Mouawad. In the Sight & Sound (July 2011) extracts that comprised the BFI handout, Villeneuve says that, when he saw the play, ‘it was like a punch in the jaw. I emerged from the theatre on shaky knees. Right away I knew I was going to make it into a movie’. The result is impressive. Incendies’ only problem, a large one, is that the two main elements – graphic war drama and family mystery story – don’t mesh, are perhaps even in conflict with each other.
In present-day Montreal, a lawyer (Rémy Girard) reads the will of a late client to her grown-up daughter and son. The lawyer’s name is Jean Lebel. The testatrix, Nawal Marwan, an Arab immigrant to Canada, was also for many years Lebel’s secretary. Her will charges twin siblings Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) to track down a brother they didn’t know they had, and their father, whom they assumed was dead. Nawal has left two letters, one to be delivered to each of the lost brother and father. The will also refers cryptically to her failure to keep a promise. This can be redeemed only by delivery of the letters, as instructed. Unless that happens, Nawal requests that she be buried naked in the earth, sans coffin or gravestone. Jeanne immediately accepts the curious assignment. Simon, who doesn’t remember his mother fondly, declines it.
From this point Incendies, in Villeneuve and Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne’s adaptation, proceeds as a dual narrative. Jeanne travels to Nawal’s native country in the Middle East. Her experiences there, as she pursues her unpromising quest, alternate with flashbacks to her mother’s pre-Canada past. Nawal (Lubna Azabal), raised as a Christian, fell in love with a refugee, and pregnant with his child. Her appalled family murdered her lover and planned to execute Nawal as an honour killing. With the help of her grandmother (Majida Hussein), she escaped to the city of Daresh and became a student there. Her baby boy was taken from her and placed in an orphanage, later destroyed in a national civil war. After surviving an attack by Christian nationalists on a bus on which she was travelling – most of the passengers were Muslim refugees – Nawal joined the Muslim side in the war. She assassinated a nationalist leader and was imprisoned. In jail, she became known as ‘the woman who sings’; a main reason for her singing was to drown out the cries of other prisoners undergoing torture. Nawal was raped in her cell, and impregnated, by the most notorious torturer, Abou Tarek (Abdelghafour Elaaziz), and gave birth to twins. On her release from prison, she took them to Canada.
It will be obvious from the above that the Middle Eastern country in the story goes unnamed (locations within it – Daresh and so on – have invented names). It will be nearly as obvious, even so, that the country is Lebanon and the conflict based on the Lebanese Civil War that began in 1975 and continued for fifteen years. In not identifying the country, Villeneuve is reflecting Wajdi Mouawad’s original but he also told S&S that he wanted ‘an imaginary space like Costa-Gavras’s Z [1969] so as to free it from any political bias’. This is an odd comparison to make – certainly an odd reason to make it. Z begins with a kind of anti-disclaimer – ‘Any resemblance to actual events or to persons living or dead is not coincidental. It is intentional’. The resemblances are to recent Greek political history and history-makers: Costa-Gavras’s kinetic thriller gained substance from his evident antipathy to the ‘regime of the Colonels’ that ruled Greece at the time Z was made and released.
The flashbacks in Incendies are meant to reflect what the daughter, on her travels and through her various enquiries, discovers of the mother’s past. The sequences in which Jeanne herself features are well done – particularly a visit to the community in which Nawal was raised, and which hasn’t forgotten her scandalous behaviour – but they’re inevitably overshadowed by the brutality witnessed or experienced by Nawal. Once Simon has been persuaded by his sister to join the search, and flies over from Canada with Jean Lebel, this narrative balance changes. Although there are still flashbacks, the emphasis is increasingly on solving a mystery rather than depicting war and war crimes – which Villeneuve, his DP André Turpin and his editor Monique Dartonne have done so powerfully. One’s shocked and impressed by the cleverness of the culminating revelation in the story but the shock is of a different order from that of the graphic scenes of carnage. And in the light of those scenes, it feels wrong now to be thinking, ‘Oh, that’s clever’.
The mystery’s solution is planted in the opening minutes, before the action switches to the very different environment of Lebel’s office. After presenting a long shot of a peaceful Levantine landscape, the camera focuses on a group of very young children whose heads are being shaved, and is magnetised by the face of one boy (Hussein Sami), who stares back angrily. The camera also picks up a pattern of three dots on the boy’s ankle – the same pattern that we learn was tattooed on Nawal’s illegitimate son Nihad before they were separated. Although his orphanage was razed by Muslim militant Chamseddine, children there, including Nihad, were converted to Islam and trained to be child soldiers. While fighting in the civil war as a young man, Nihad was captured by nationalists, and turned again. He changed his name to Abou Tarek, became the torturer in the jail where Nawal was imprisoned. After the civil war, he too was enabled to resettle in Canada. Decades later (as a rare flashback to her later life reveals), Nawal is swimming in a public pool in Montreal. Pausing in the water to get her breath, she notices three dots on the ankle of a man standing poolside. When she sees his face, she recognises her rapist from the prison. The twins’ half-brother is also their father. The two letters their mother has written are to be delivered, back in Canada, to the same person.
There are things in Incendies that bring to mind a Victorian novel – the catalytic reading of a will with singular provisions, a unique physical characteristic that establishes identity, the revelation of astonishing blood relationships and the literally heart-stopping effect of such a revelation. (Soon after the swimming-pool encounter, Nawal suffers a stroke and dies.) Even though some of the plot twists – like the involuntary dual conversion of Nihad/Abou Tarek, who becomes more hate-filled with each new incarnation – make a strong political point, the melodramatic coincidences serve to reinforce the mismatch of the film’s modern Middle East warfare and family secrets aspects.
There are a few more directly unsatisfying elements. Once Simon and Lebel arrive on the scene, the journey to the whole truth, in which Simon’s interview with the elderly Chamseddine (Mohamed Majd) is pivotal, seems, if not rushed, too straightforward. Allowing that he’s obviously some years the senior of Jeanne and Simon, Nihad looks a bit too old – thirtyish – when he rapes the woman that he doesn’t realise is his mother. We hear, as we obviously need to hear, Nawal’s voiceover reading the contents of the letters eventually handed to Nihad by the twins: one letter expresses undying contempt for the rapist-father, the other undying love for Nawal’s son. It was probably a mistake, though, to show the recipient’s face as, alone in his room, he reads the letters. The actor concerned, who’s had very little screen time other than for the rape scene, is set an impossible task of silently reacting to them.
I’ve spent too much time accentuating the negative. There’s some truly imaginative, as well as accomplished, film-making in Incendies. One memorable instance is the pattern of water sequences – a flashback to the twins’ against-the-odds survival shortly after birth, the swim they take together in a pool after learning about this, the connection of this to the other swimming pool where Nawal confronts the tattooed ankle. In a strong cast, Lubna Azabal is outstanding and thoroughly credible (except, in a ten-second scene, when Nawal is on her deathbed: this is the fault not of the actress but of a bad wig). Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin is excellent, too. It’s not easy to get out of your head the sound of Jeanne’s sharp intake of breath – nearly a stifled scream – when Simon wonders aloud, ‘One plus one, does it make one?’, and the penny drops.
17 September 2021
[1] I’ve not seen Blade Runner 2049 (2017) or Enemy (2013). (The latter, with an international cast headed by Jake Gyllenhaal, is, according to Wikipedia, a Canadian-Spanish rather than an American film.)
