The Best of Villeneuve: Incendies
This is an article I wrote for the University of Exeter’s student newspaper, Exeposé, and appeared in its print edition.
Originally a play by Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad – who received the film with open arms: “I’m as delighted for Denis as I would be for a twin brother” – Incendies follows actual twins Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette) as they travel to their ancestral home to recover their family’s terrible past and honour their mother’s (Lubna Azabal) dying wish.
Taking place all over Lebanon, both during and after the country’s bloody civil war, it’s a story largely concerned with the life-altering trauma of warfare and that generational disfigurement that seems to linger wherever it appears. It’s really beyond the death we see that there comes the sense that no one who manages to escape the violence with their life will do so entirely intact – some part of them will be lost or fundamentally changed. It’s a fact that impacts not just them but all those with whom they’re connected.
Violence is inevitable, then, and when it rears its head Villeneuve renders it in barbaric strokes. But a crucial emphasis is placed on the real horror therein, rather than the morbid spectacle. What’s unnecessary is dispensed with. Villeneuve wants to, and succeeds, in shaking you deeply, but he’s entirely uninterested in one-note provocation and emotional manipulation. Incendies presents a Villeneuve in full command of his craft, knowing exactly when to let loose with both barrels, and when to ease off to give us space enough to grapple, alone, with what’s occurred; with what all this loss and all this pain means.
Though, as Dune shows, Villeneuve knows how to construct a spectacle, it’s more in those pregnant pauses between the violence he constructs that he really shines. So there’s something bittersweet about the filmmaker’s breakthrough into the world of blockbuster success. Villeneuve’s long-awaited mainstream recognition is well-deserved and something to be celebrated, but in comparing Dune to Incendies, there soon comes the feeling that he’s lost some sight of what made his work so special in the first place.