June 26, 2011
Incendies obliquely chronicles the adult life of Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), an Arab woman living in Canada whose death sends her two children to find the father they believed was dead and a brother they never knew existed.
The siblings, twins Jeanne and Simon (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette), travel to Nawal’s war-ravaged, unnamed home country (Lebanon?), where their investigative legwork intertwines with flashbacks of their mother’s brutal past and cinematographer André Turpin’s widescreen tracking shots of semi-desert, olive groves and Middle Easten cityscape.
But while the symbolic duality threaded throughout the story (most notably in the twins’ mildly fractious but under-cooked relationship) is apt and interesting, it ultimately amounts to the scaffolding for yet another outing on film for the nasty ironies of war, one that never really amounts to anything that hasn’t already been raked over in 1001 pictures from The Dambusters to Days of Glory via Apocalypse Now. Poor Nawal’s woes are more than once in the vein of a Latin American soap opera rather than Greek tragedy, and Jeanne and Simon’s climactic discovery plays like a clunking rather than the sleight-of-hand, profoundly tautological revelation it aspires to be.
The skewed chronology of the film, slipping at will in and out of flashback with location changes, from a slush-encrusted Canada to the arid Levant where we stumble from boulder-strewn hillside to refugee camp, is signalled on screen by over-large red capitals just in case anyone’s falling asleep. This time travel serves in my view to obfuscate rather than clarify the narrative and contributed to the growing feeling I had of confusion within a overall sense of being manipulated, visually and emotionally, by the film makers.
This sense was reinforced at the end where extreme coincidence and underplaying by the actors managed in my case to quash the empathetic sense of horror which the director doubtless wishes his audience to experience as the final credits creep by.
The siblings, twins Jeanne and Simon (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette), travel to Nawal’s war-ravaged, unnamed home country (Lebanon?), where their investigative legwork intertwines with flashbacks of their mother’s brutal past and cinematographer André Turpin’s widescreen tracking shots of semi-desert, olive groves and Middle Easten cityscape.
But while the symbolic duality threaded throughout the story (most notably in the twins’ mildly fractious but under-cooked relationship) is apt and interesting, it ultimately amounts to the scaffolding for yet another outing on film for the nasty ironies of war, one that never really amounts to anything that hasn’t already been raked over in 1001 pictures from The Dambusters to Days of Glory via Apocalypse Now. Poor Nawal’s woes are more than once in the vein of a Latin American soap opera rather than Greek tragedy, and Jeanne and Simon’s climactic discovery plays like a clunking rather than the sleight-of-hand, profoundly tautological revelation it aspires to be.
The skewed chronology of the film, slipping at will in and out of flashback with location changes, from a slush-encrusted Canada to the arid Levant where we stumble from boulder-strewn hillside to refugee camp, is signalled on screen by over-large red capitals just in case anyone’s falling asleep. This time travel serves in my view to obfuscate rather than clarify the narrative and contributed to the growing feeling I had of confusion within a overall sense of being manipulated, visually and emotionally, by the film makers.
This sense was reinforced at the end where extreme coincidence and underplaying by the actors managed in my case to quash the empathetic sense of horror which the director doubtless wishes his audience to experience as the final credits creep by.
