For a film that can be so smart,
Incendies sure does suffer from some amateurish mistakes. A mystery concerning the unraveling of two twins' lives in the wake of their mother's death, Denis Villeneuve's film splits its focus between past and present as we track the family tree from the Middle East to Québec. Fundamentally, however, this has the effect of not simply either showing or telling the audience the importance of the mother's life and the depth of her secrets but doing both. Essentially, the audience gets every key piece of information twice, if not more so; Villeneuve presents the final twist in at least four different ways, draining the moment of its impact.
The story begins in Québec, with Simon and Jeanne Marwan (Maxim Gaudette and Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) meeting with their late mother's notary (and former boss) as he reads the will. The man calmly reads out the woman's unorthodox wishes, which ask the children to seek out the father they thought dead and the brother they did not know existed. Simon, petulant and nursing a clear resentment for his mother, wants no part of this ridiculous goose chase and leaves his more amenable sister to track down her mother's past in a fictionalized stand-in for Lebanon during its civil war. What Jeanne finds will upend her and her brother's lives.
