Montreal. Arab Canadian twins Simon and his sister Jeanne arrive to hear the testament of their estranged deceased mother Nawal, and the notary Jean reads them that she shall be burried naked in the ground without a tombstone all until Simon and Jeanne can find their lost dad and brother. Jeanne travels to the Arab country of her mother and questions people about her. She finds out Nawal was a Christian who got pregnant with a refugee who was executed, so she gave her baby boy to an orphanage. When a Muslim-Christian civil war broke out, Nawal shot a Christian militant commander and was imprisoned for 15 years in a camp, where she was raped by a certain Abou Tarek. Nawal became pregnant and gave her twins, Jeanne and Simon, for adoption. Years later, in Canada, Nawal met her first son again, and realized he is Abou who raped her, which caused her health to deteriorate. Upon finding that out, Jeanne and Simon are shocked, but still give Nawal's letter to Abou.
Sometimes only one sequence is enough to give a movie a certain legendary reputation, a sort of subconscious collective cultural heritage that is respected, and the plot twist pool sequence in "Incendies" is among them. In it, the heroine Nawal, who gave up her baby at birth, but had three vertical dots tattooed on its back side of heel to help identify it, stumbles upon a leg of a man with said three dots standing on the pool platform. When she figures out he is her lost son, and connects what his identity is, the movie reaches such psychological intensity that all its previous flaws are immediately forgiven and forgotten. Canadian director Dennis Villeneueve directed several overrated American movies based on a certain previous 'critical credit', and when the viewers see his early film "Incendies", they will realize this is the origin of his reputation. It is an excellent film. A one that dumps local Canadian issues for the sake of an international issue that has more reach and appeal, in this case a one that (indirectly) contemplates about the consequences of the Lebanese Civil War that spilled over to Canada.
The flaw in this approach is that the movie never names the country, pretending, for some reason, to talk about universal problems about the clash between cultures and religions, and the traumas that pollute the lives of so many people, but without much reason for such forced secrecy. The movie is an adaptation of the eponymous Canadian play by Wajdi Mouawad, who based it on loosely on the life and ordeal of Soha Bechara, who wanted to assassinate Antoina Lahad, the Christian fundamentalist commander of the South Lebanon Army, and was locked up in Khaim prison for 10 years without charges. As the twins, Jeanne and Simon, slowly reveal more about the past of their mother Nawal, the movie turns into a sort of investigative detective story, which slowly creates pieces of a puzzle that connect in the end. Not everything works. Some flaws are the forced, clumsily directed bus massacre sequence which happens almost out of nowhere, without any context or trigger, and the movie's running time is a bit overlong. And as Roger Ebert already pointed out, the logic is not always with this concept: why didn't the mother simply tell their kids the secret while she was alive, instead of writing a letter and sending them to a country where they could be in danger? However, the already mentioned plot twist at the end is brilliant, a sort of amalgamation of concepts found in "Oldboy", Dunaway's character in "Chinatown" and "Halima's Path", all leading to a grand finale that deplores human cruelty which never improves human lives, but only makes it worse for everyone. A highlight of Canadian cinema.
Grade:+++
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