Incendies (15)

Today we have the excellent and hard-hitting Incendies, recently out on DVD and Blu-ray.

Incendies (15) (This review on FilmJuice.com)

Sometimes you wish the horrors in a film were just that, part of a horror film without root in reality. But here the horrors are all too real. Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s devastating sucker punch of a film charts twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) on a journey that unravels their identities and unveils their past.

After their mother’s sudden death, the twins open her Will with her employer, a notary called Jean. In it she has asked them to travel to her home country in the Middle East, to discover the facts of their mysterious family origins.

The twin’s odyssey is interwoven with flashbacks to the past struggles of their mother Nawal (Lubna Azabal). The effect is straightforward and to the point, the intention clearly being to bring home to Westerners what life for many in the Middle East is really like. The tone is set beautifully by a recurring Radiohead song, which is strangely appropriate and avoids being jarring, with just the right contemporary blend of unsettling raw emotion.

Incendies (or ‘Scorched’ in English) is based on an award winning play by Wajdi Mouawad, which in the past has been criticised for being melodramatic, and some of that criticism could certainly be levelled at the film version. It is flawed then, but Villeneuve expertly and successfully disguises the plot’s weaknesses by pressing hard on the thriller button, and he never drops the ball in terms of suspense.

To put it simply, the ending, if you can stomach it, will leave you reeling. Undoubtedly it is one of the most gut wrenching and emotionally draining finales to a film in a recent years; the darkest secrets are truly saved for last. Therein lies another flaw however: though excellent in their respective roles, it was always a tall order for Désormeaux-Poulin and Gaudette to portray the extremes of emotional torture that their characters are put through. Thankfully such feelings are too distant for most of us to imagine, and the director partly compensates for this with great use of understated emotive imagery, symbols and sounds. Perhaps it’s best that some things remain unfilmable.

The cinematography is accomplished; nothing we haven’t seen before but still beautiful from time to time. Grégoire Hetzel’s score is haunting and very sparse; the film largely being silent aside from voices and atmospheric sounds. This creates an atmosphere of realism, thus lending the truths from the real world that the script brings to light even greater impact.

Not being a ‘date movie’ Incendies hasn’t won as many viewers as it deserves, but having been rightly nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars this year, it will hopefully be more successful on DVD. If you’ve got two hours to sit back and concentrate, then Incendies will engross, enlighten, shock and move you unforgettably.