All These Things We'll One Day Swallow Whole

Incendies

***1/2 out of ****

Directed by: Denis Villeneuve

Starring: Lubna Azabal, Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin, Remy Girard, Maxim Gaudette and Allen Altman

Running time: 130 minutes

When Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin) and her twin brother, Simon (Maxim Gaudette), are given the will of their late Arab-Canadian mother, Nawal Marwan, the instructions are not as they expect.

The twins are asked to deliver two envelopes: one is addressed to their brother, who they never knew existed, while the other is for the father, who they long presumed to be dead. They also get the order to bury her face down, away from the world.

With her interest piqued by this quest, Jeanne departs from Montreal to Fuad, a fictional Middle Eastern nation, to track down her family while trying to uncover the reason behind her mother’s, well, grave request.

And thus begins the opening reel of Incendies, a shocking detective thriller based upon an acclaimed stage play by Wajdi Mouawad. It is a chilling exploration into the horrors of political strife and civil war, tackled as fearlessly as its French-Canadian writer/director, Denis Villeneuve, did for another uncompromising subject, the Polytechnique massacre, in his previous film.

This film could also help Canada score its second Foreign Language Oscar victory in seven years (Denys Arcand took home the prize for The Barbarian Invasions in 2004), and it certainly deserves the honour.

Incendies (translated as “Scorched” in English) jumps back and forth between Jeanne’s travels throughout Fuad and flashbacks to Nawal as a young woman (portrayed by Lubna Azabal). When Jeanne asks a clan of Muslim women if they know her family name, several of them glare at her with disgust, as if she had yelled a racial epithet.

Taken aback, Jeanne gets the hint that she is not wanted, and that Nawal’s exodus from the vapid wasteland region – modeled off Lebanon, as well as its devastating 1975-90 civil war – was done to protect her children from a lifetime of shame. She plods further on, but the unsettling details have only begun to take shape.

Unwilling to spoil some shocking plot developments, I will reveal that Nawal’s story, which occupies half of the film’s screen time, is relentlessly taxing and quite grotesque – especially for those sensitive to sexual violence and the murdering of young children. And if the graphic atrocities prove to be too much, beware: the final twist is numbing.

The prologue, set to a rumbling Radiohead tune, takes place in a grimy room of Muslim boys as their heads are being shaved. They are stony and expressionless, except their eyes glare at the camera. The rest of the film seethes with the same wallowing anger, depicted by Andre Turpin’s stark, sun-baked photography (the film was shot in the Jordanian countryside) and casual wallops of explosive violence, intricately executed by Villeneuve.

With her eyes intent but spirit slowly shattering, Azabal is riveting as Nawal, trying to move past the trauma and bloodshed, even as acrid fumes of injustice billow through her homeland, threatening to suffocate her will to live.

Incendies may be a downer, but it is a blisteringly powerful one, complete with sharp performances and brave, confident direction by one of Canada’s premiere filmmakers.