latinmelkor Review of Incendies

Incendies (2010)

A touching film that depends on coincidences all the way up to ridiculous

[6/10 · 25 November 2020]

I have written this review as a response to all those who find in this film a perfect jewel and label it as underrated (although in many sites it is highly rated and has more than 100,000 views). It is true that it is a very entertaining and interesting film, and I think that, for many viewers, the obvious weaknesses of the film are not so obvious. Something that I liked and called attention to is the narrative structure. Some twins (female and male) find out from their mother's will that they have a brother and that their father is alive. The mother commands them to find them both. During the first part of the film, only the daughter decides to carry out her mother's wishes, and to do so she travels to a Middle Eastern country (which is never specified) where, as she travels through places that played an important role in her mother's life, we are presented with her biography through flashbacks. It is easy to feel confused at first with the factions (Christian and Muslim), because they do not correspond to a historical reality, but rather were made in the service of fiction. However, little by little, the viewer is able to put the puzzle back together and discover the hard life that the woman led in the midst of violence and intolerance. The film has a lot of plot-twists that manage to arouse the interest of their audience and, to a certain extent, are presented in such a way that it is possible to glimpse them when they approach. Unfortunately, the film depends too much on coincidences of sudden and unexplained developments. About this, in many occasions I found elements that, although they should seem natural, were not very well explained and, of course, for the final outcome to happen the scriptwriters took the coincidences to the last consequences. Although Nawal Marwan seems to live in a rural environment, she is able to move to a relative who works at a university. Despite the fact that at first she cannot read or write (at around 21 years of age), she soon manages to work at a newspaper writing articles. The screenwriters made Marwan a prodigious mind: even though she began receiving education as an adult, within a few years she is able to infiltrate as a tutor to the son of an extremist Christian leader she was tasked to kill, teaching him French and English. After killing this leader, she is finally captured and taken to a prison where she is tortured for no less than 15 years. After being raped by one of her captors and becoming pregnant, she is released (instead of executed) and, with the help of the warlord who benefited from the Christian leader's death, she's exiled to Canada. The same pattern is repeated in the son's story. He is left in an orphanage where, ultimately, is recruited by an extremist Muslim group. There he is trained as a militia officer, a sniper. He is not just any sniper, of course, he is the most skilled and recognized of all. Eventually, the enemy faction, the Christians, manage to capture him, but, because of his ability, they decide not to execute him but to recruit him themselves (wasn't it supposed to be a holy war?) and, moreover, they do not train him as a sniper (there is no justification for it), but as a torturer. In his new job he ends up working in the prison where, by chance, his mother is. He unknowingly rapes her, she gets her pregnant and thus he becomes the twins' father and brother at the same time. This is shocking and, I admit, makes one reflect on the way in which war separates people who, in peace, would live together happily. It is a sad and painful story, incisive and critical of the senselessness of war, but it is weakened by its dependence on so many unjustified elements. And, without a doubt, what put me most against the film was how the mother came to know that the one who raped her was her own son. In a swimming pool, the woman sees a man who, on his foot, has the tattoo with which she marked her son to identify him. Then, upon discovering his face, she is horrified that her son is the father of the twins, the rapist. The pain of the scene is diluted by the coincidences: her son emigrated from the country where he was originally and precisely that country is Canada and, besides, she finds him in a pool, where she can see his foot and recognize the mark. Finally, the son is unable to recognize her as his victim, so the man does not run away, fearing that he will be denounced for his past crimes. By leaving her will, the mother entrusts her children with the torturous task of discovering that they are their own brother's children, a task that would be impossible were it not for the fact that they are "lucky" enough to correlate the records and find the people who could lead them to the truth. Although I have vilified the film, in reality it is a very beautiful film visually, with an impeccable performance and a catchy plot, but it depends on coincidences that become ridiculous and take it away from a perfect rating.