Review of Incendies (2010) by Anders P — 25 Apr 2012

Trying to Regain Sight.

There is a certain extent to which the plot doesn't quite make sense, and indeed I wasn't always completely able to follow it. Of course, the past is always hazy, and the brain goes to fill it in without us. This, I know. The past that characters may find is not the past that the people who experienced events remember. Oh, it's also true that the filmmaker probably doesn't mean to dwell on that, but I generally think it's important to remember anyway. It's also why it doesn't overly bother me that I wasn't able to follow everything that was going on. The past and present of the film's chronology were kind of blurring together for me, meaning I wasn't completely sure who was experiencing the thing being shown onscreen at any given moment. This one may have been more deliberate.

Any way you look at it, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal) was dead to being with. Her children, Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette), have gone to the notary where their mother worked, Jean Lebel (Rémy Girard), for the reading of her will. She has left them their estate to be divided equally between them, but she also insisted that she be buried naked, not in a coffin, in an unmarked grave. Her grave can only be marked when the children have found their brother, whose existence they had not known of, and their father, whom they long thought dead, and deliver letters to them. Simon abdicates all responsibility for the quest, saying that his mother's death means he doesn't have to put up with things like that anymore, but Jeanne goes in search of her mother's past, and discovers many things she didn't want to know. Most of them, however, are important to her past, for all they destroy her sense of who she is.

The question, really, is how important it is to know unpleasant truths. Were Jeanne and Simon better off when they thought their father was dead? Come to that, was their father better off when he didn't know they existed? (I will not be telling you who their father turns out to be.) Or is everyone concerned better off for discovering the truth, even if it is painful? It is arguably the discovery of an awful truth that leads to Nawal's death, simply because the shock is too painful to her. When Jeanne returns to her mother's village in that nameless Middle Eastern country which is almost certainly Lebanon, she discovers that the family generally considers her mother to have so betrayed them that they are not even willing to speak her name, and they insist that Jeanne leave immediately once they discover who she is. But didn't she have the right to learn the truth about herself?

It's therefore easy to sympathize with Simon, whose desire is just to walk away from the whole thing. We learn very little about the twins' childhood, but it's easy to imagine that their mother was possessed of extremely conflicting feelings about them and was not at all an even parent. Simon, shortly after his mother's breakdown, says that she has always been confused, though Jeanne says she never was. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between, but since Simon doesn't have the background on his mother's life that the film ends up giving him, she is unreasonable and wearying. He has been told a version of his family which does not make sense with the behaviours his mother presented to him. Knowing her past would teach him the truth, but how much easier to just walk away?

This film lost Best Foreign Language Film to [i]In a Better World[/i], which we watched the other day. I've now seen four of the five nominees from 2010, and honestly, the theme of the year seems to have been "Awkward and Probably Abusive Family Relationships." (Well, okay, I didn't finish [i]Biutiful[/i], which just didn't do anything for me. But it still fit, as I recall.) While I think it was important for Jeanne and Simon, at least, to know the truth of Nawal's life, I'm not sure they needed to learn it the way they did. Jeanne and Simon were born in Unnamed Middle Eastern Country, but they moved to Canada so young that they do not remember important details about their own lives. Did Jeanne have to return to her mother's village to understand her mother's life? I don't believe she did. Certainly it ended up being a much more painful journey than she could have known it was going to be before she left.