REVIEW: Cinema Release: Incendies

Film: Incendies
Year of production: 2010
UK Release date: 24th June 2011
Distributor: Trinity
Certificate: 15
Running time: 132 mins
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Starring: Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girard, Abdelghafour Elaaziz
Genre: Drama/Mystery/War
Format: Cinema
Country of Production: Canada/France
Language: French/Arabic/English

Review by: Natalie Meziani

Adapted from the play ‘Scorched’ by Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies has been brought to the screen by Québécoise director Denis Villeneuve in this harrowing full-length feature. The film battles its way through a powerful shower of revelations in order to explore the fruitful life of Nawal Marwan, as her twin children return to their Arabic homeland to fulfil her dying wish.

Incendies begins with Canadian twins Simon and Jeanne receiving the will of their mother, Nawal, providing them with some bizarre burial instructions and a pair of unopened envelopes for them to deliver. Nawal asks the twins to return to her native soil in search of a father they had believed to be dead and a brother they didn’t know existed in order to deliver one letter to each. It is only then that she may be buried properly, for without this final act she claims that she is not worthy of the privilege of a grave.

In order to carry out their search, the twins are obliged to learn the facts of their mother’s past by exploring the place where she was brought up. Simon is initially reluctant to participate, but Jeanne immediately finds herself in the Middle East in search of her mother’s truth. This facilitates the revelation of crucial moments in Nawal’s life which they could never have even dreamt, painting a detailed and painful picture in order to gradually understand how to find their father and brother.

The twins soon realise that they do not know their mother at all. The events which she has endured have been completely buried during her time in Canada. We progressively construct her life through largely horrific chronological flashbacks, including Nawal giving birth after being raped during her 15-year imprisonment for shooting a political leader. The final scene surpasses the many shocking events witnessed during Nawal’s life, taking the audience miles past the point of comfortable fiction, but definitely into the territory of a masterpiece...


It is increasingly rare that visual art can have such a large part in the creation of emotion, and cinematographer André Turpin plays a brilliant role in executing this. The muted colour used in the depiction of Nawal’s life adds a subtle beauty to her horrendous past; creating a tone of sadness in the fact that such courage could ever exist. The transitions from present activity to flashbacks of Nawal’s life are allocated chapter headings, slammed onto the screen in a stark red lettering which further adds to the film’s strong character.

The political content implies that Nawal’s experiences occur in Lebanon, although no country is ever named. This suggests that the film is making a sweeping statement about the difficulties of war-infused life rather than making a point about Lebanese history, allowing Incendies the ability to uphold a widespread poignancy. This universal appeal undoubtedly places Villeneuve amongst the best of world-class film directors.

Villeneuve regularly uses still shots filled with crushing silence, which are almost necessary in allowing the viewer to digest each morsel of devastation before the next scene takes place. The use of Radiohead in the soundtrack haunts the screen and enhances the story’s distress, which is particularly well-placed in the opening scene. Such a huge contemporary band also links Incendies to the present era, giving us a larger capacity to be empathetically shocked.

The shattering pain of Nawal is spoken through the eyes of Lubna Azabal in some of the most moving acting to grace Canadian cinema; her manipulation of each individual trauma is exquisite. Maxim Gaudette plays the lesser tolerant twin Simon, while Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin is the more determined Jeanne. The two create a delicately believable onscreen sibling chemistry, allowing the story to strike a chord in the audience’s hearts. Even minor characters in Incendies are incredibly apt at building emotion within scenes; there is such raw and realistic passion present in all the performances that one could easily assume they are acting out a true story based on themselves. The film’s biggest punch is based on an outlandish coincidence, and yet its creditability is not tainted thanks to the perfection presented by the script and acting.


Incendies has an abundance of awards under its belt and a Best Foreign Language Oscar nomination. This comes as no surprise. The film follows an explosive path of grandeur; it is dramatic, it is overstated, and it is drawn out. But the entire package is of such a high standard that it is necessary in all its excess – the austere visual and emotional content is of the highest calibre. NM 

SPECIAL FEATURE: Film Review: Incendies

Film: Incendies
Running time: 130 mins
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Starring: Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girard, Abdelghafour Elaaziz
Genre: Drama
Country: Canada/France

This film will be screened at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which takes place in London between 23rd March and 1st April, 2011. Find out more about this event by clicking here.

Oscar’s Foreign Language committee this year selected Incendies, the latest project of Canadian-born Denis Villeneuve (Maelström, Polytechnique) as one of its five nominated picks. The film first premiered as part of the Critics Week at last year’s Venice Film Festival, and has since gone on to showings at Toronto, and more recently Sundance. Incendies, which translates from French as ‘fire’, follows in the mould of Villeneuve’s previous forays into personal self-discovery (particularly of women) and the cultural hybridism which makes us who we are.

After the death of their mother, Nawal, twin siblings Jeanne and Simon are read her will, which states that she’d like them to travel to the Middle East to find their estranged father and brother. Carrying resentment towards his mother, Simon’s immediate reaction is hostile, but Jeanne is eminently more curious about her ambiguous upbringing, and so abandons her studies in search of answers.

The film features extended flashbacks of Nawal searching for the son she had as a teenager, and how she is led into a world of criminality and shame. As Jeanne ventures on her journey, she finds herself taking a path parallel to Nawal’s, and as the film interchanges between each woman’s stories, the murkier elements of their family history are revealed…


Despite there not being many specific locations in the film, Incendies possesses a surprisingly powerful sense of visual scope, heavily aided by the methods of director Villeneuve. He exercises an assured ease of storytelling; unfussy and simple across sparse terrain, effective in drawing us into a scene and generous in allowing us to recognise where we are in his puzzling wilderness. Save for some liberal use of Radiohead tunes, Incendies bears a mythical aesthetic refinement, and without seeming at all over-stylised or idyllic. It meshes well with the general uncertainty of the characters and their quest for closure, the large desolate expanses alluding to a realm of unknown possibility.

Incendies is comparable with Julian Schnabel’s Miral in terms of structure, depicting women in search of solace at the same points in their life, but in different points in time. While Schnabel’s film toys with that structure to tremendous self-detriment, the way Incendies runs its old and new story strands parallel to one another enhances our view of the women, and ties the film’s themes together well through cross-generational relativity. It’s an astutely interdependent way of presenting Jeanne’s cultural homecoming; how in retracing her mother’s steps they share some form of cyclical, realised strength. We don’t really know much about Jeanne’s character, since she becomes a passive component of a deluge of revelations, but the fact that we’re undergoing this Middle Eastern learning curve with her allows us to somewhat identify with her naïve, misunderstood outlook on heritage and belonging.

The film’s key misfires emerge when it comes to generating drama; effective certainly, but flagrant and undeniably contrived. A scene in which Nawal is the only survivor of a massacre reeks of religious symbolism and doesn’t fit well within the grand scheme of things. Worse still, the final discovery in the film is an emotionally manipulative device that feels orchestrated to make Incendies feel that bit more impacting as a dramatic showcase. All this revelation does is leave a bitter taste in the mouth, and ensures that the film has straddled both the sublime and the ridiculous.

For long periods, Incendies is basically a heavy-set version of reality television show Who Do You Think You Are?, providing genealogical information as its primary dramatic impetus. It’s an interesting way of relaying exposition, but, considering the rather aimless way in which Jeanne embarks on this journey, there’s an awful lot of amateur-sleuthing going on. It’s somewhat remarkable, for example, how she so fortunately stumbles upon key figures of her mother’s past without really encountering any resistance to her cause.

The encroaching impression you get while watching Incendies is that it has somewhat taken the easy way out; that by making the entire film a slow-burning discovery, all of the major plot points are mapped-out so that we can’t really challenge them. This has already ‘happened’; therefore we’re supposed to accept it? Once Jeanne has learned all that she can about her family, it becomes clear that the film has always been working towards this dark emotional payoff, promoting the expanse of its cultural network before then asserting that, “It’s a small world after all.” The sensationalist culmination detracts from the natural feel of the film, and disappointingly undermines the patience with which it documents Jeanne’s cultural enlightenment.


Villeneuve’s visual flair makes Incendies more of a compelling mystery than it really ought to be, ambitious in terms of structure and theme, but far too rash with its dramatic devices. Above all, it makes you think about this family; why this mother was so alienated from her children, and is so well-crafted overall that the late, arrogant element of surprise feels like a betrayal. Is this manipulation part of a desperate ploy to shock? Either way, the fire analogy rings true: the lost souls of Incendies suffer severe burns, but sadly, so do we. CR