The heroine who comes to this conclusion is the author of the two letters, Nawal Lubna Azabal , the twins' mother. Jeanne travels to the Middle East to carry out her mother's wishes. Simon stays resentfully in Canada until later in the story. In flashbacks spurred by Jeanne's meetings and conversations, we learn of Nawal's early life. Born a Christian, she fell in love with a Muslim. This was impossible for both of them in that time and place. It led her on a romantic, religious and political odyssey, and inspired her to do unthinkable things.
All about her, others were also doing the unthinkable. People who were not murderers in their nature killed others and justified it, on both sides, in the names of their gods. And when enough people had died, they no longer needed their gods, because they sought personal or tribal revenge.
A season of murder by fanatics broadened into years of retribution by bystanders who take up their guns. Villeneuve is especially chilling when he shows young adolescents with rifles, killing others their own age when neither shooter nor target is old enough to understand the gift of life. The plot of "Incendies" is based on a play by Wajdi Mouawad , described as consisting of poetic monologues.
The screenplay by Villeneuve refashions the action in a way more suited to a film, where it is often better to show something than to evoke its mental image. The underlying story here could with a few adjustments be a noir set in any country, taking its choice of all the sad justifications men find for murder. In its Middle Eastern setting, the film takes on a contemporary feel, and the scenes of battle, rape and torture are concise and pitiless.
The performance of Lubna Azabal, who plays Nawal over a range of years, is never less than compelling; she helps us understand in a visceral way why she acts as she does — as she must — under the circumstances she is unlucky enough to inherit. And Villeneuve's writing and direction do an effective job of making clear events that might have become cloudy. The specific way, in cryptic dialogue, that he reveals his film's shocking secret is flawless.
The film's ending, which you will not learn from me, is stunning in its impact. I am not sure it quite works out in terms of strict logic, but logic can be forgotten when the purpose is revelation. And that revelation, when it comes, lays bare the pathos of "justified" murder and the pathology of cruelty.
I am left with a question you might want to ask yourself after seeing the film: What was the mother's purpose in leaving the letters for her children? Yes, we can see, they deserve to know the truth about their father and their brother. She could have told them — either in life, or for that matter, in the letters. By sealing the letters, she assigns them a mission that could easily have failed.
If they had not found the recipients, they would not have learned the truth. Then what purpose did the letters serve? Well, of course they provided the motive for Jeanne's journey, and later for Simon's. This searing drama forced me to confront the uncomfortable reality of my relatively privileged upbringing in the Middle East. Be depressed. Simply put, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. These multiple strands of time are neatly interwoven across the contrasting landscapes of suburban Canada and an unnamed Middle Eastern country.
One scene involving a massacre on a bus stands out as particularly harrowing — a devastating echo to a real-life event that involved the murder of numerous Palestinian refugees in the Ain el-Rammaneh district of east Beirut in I was born and raised in the United Arab Emirates and first watched Incendies while I was still living there.
The Middle East was, and remains to this day, a region divided by in-fighting and political unrest. As a teenager, I knew that there was violence surrounding me, wars and disputes that I would gloss over in the Gulf News en route to the culture section, but I never appreciated the extent or proximity of the destruction.
The brutal and arid landscape that Villenueve depicted bore no similarities to the Disneyfied bubble of the UAE that I was familiar with; it was dangerous, angry, bitterly divided. As an expat, I was afforded the luxury of living in the Mashriq without ever having to consider the politics of the region, free to simply fuck off somewhere else if things ever became too volatile.
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