I live in Sydney while my fraternal twin brother lives in Canberra. My mother who lives overseas is always (and gently) reminding us to take care of each other: “After I’m gone, he will be the closest flesh and blood you have.”
But what if the ghosts of her past were alive, roaming the world, sharing our DNA? What if, after her death, we were handed two envelopes by the notary of her will, the one in my hand destined for my missing father, the one in my brother’s address to our unknown brother? I was left just as shocked and shattered as the twins Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette) in Denis Villeneuve’s 2010 French-Canadian film, Incendies (2010) who were asked to embark on a journey of discovery in the wake of the death of their mother, Nawal (Lubna Azbal), and come to terms with a burdensome truth.
In the dim winter grey of a notary’s office begins Incendies (2010), directed by Denis Villeneuve and co-written with Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne, nominated for Best International Feature of the 2011 Oscars. A scene of the twins’ furrowed brows and dumbstruck hearts follows a harrowing sequence set to Radiohead’s ‘You and Whose Army?’— while the film ends with ‘Like Spinning Plates’ from the same album. To Thom Yorke’s plaintive and lamenting vocals, we pan from a Levantine landscape to the bloodied faces and dirt-smudged brown limbs of children. Their heads are being tonsured by culpable hands, moulding them to participate in what is implied to be the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) given that the source material is from a play by Lebanese-Canadian Wajdi Mouawad, and Villeneuve preferred not to anchor his story to a specific setting. As the instrumental crescendos, the uncannily tilted gaze of a tattooed boy tells us he is calloused by the cruel hands of domestic and foreign political actors, and has been robbed of his mother’s caress. Incendies is set against societal divisions, but the focal conflict is in a mother’s sacrifice and love, clawing through intergenerational trauma.
The central question posed, can time heal wounds, or does it let generational conflicts fester? Villeneuve traverses Incendies in flashbacks, thus reopening the mother’s wounds. Throughout the film, the twins uncover photographs, prison records, listen to words babbled in hospital beds by phantoms of the past, and vocalise secrets previously spoken in hushed tones. Villeneuve films Narwal’s past as if her pain is raw: no detail is spared from the blinding sun’s glare, or the glow of burning flesh. ‘Incendies’, French for ‘scorched’, becomes a motif of reignited family ties and an inextinguishable trauma.
When the twins — and we, the audience — travel backwards to the origins of this trauma, we enter Nawal’s family home. In the tranquil hills, we hear a distant gunshot aimed at her Muslim lover by her Christian family. She is spared from her brothers’ ‘honour killing’, and gives birth to a son, only for her family to leave him in an orphanage before she could decide for herself.
As a South Indian migrant from a Hindu background, retracing the history of religious conflict is especially important to me. Given the proliferation of dangerous Hindu nationalism and marginalisation of specific populations, namely Muslims, it is important to recognise the real-life divisions underpinning Incendies, as they are presented as subtext for Villeneuve’s ‘family drama’. In a particularly graphic scene, Nawal dons a headscarf and hides her rosary to seek refuge aboard a refugee Muslim bus. When it is bombarded by Christians, she wields her cross to be spared, claiming a Muslim child as her own to spare her life. Yet, screaming, the child breaks free and runs toward the bullet-ridden bus, where her mother is being consumed by flames.
When Nawal goes to university, she becomes politically active as civil war breaks out and splits the unnamed city, a stand-in for Beirut. Various Lebanese militias including the right-wing Phalangist Party fought against the Palestine Liberation Organisation who led armed resistance against Israel from Lebanese territory, with the support of a coalition of leftists.
Audiences who know these overlapping contexts savour layers of meaning, but for many, this story of a divided nation is a distant unknown reality. Playwright Mouawad drew from the life of Lebanese resistance fighter Souha Bechara when constructing Nawal’s character. Bechara, who attempted to assassinate the leader of the South Lebanon Army Antoine Lahad, was caught and taken to the Khiam prison, notorious for inhumane imprisonment and torture of those who acted against Israel. This detention centre, which remains a museum today, is a reminder of the flouting of human rights. Villeneuve’s film, a meditation on memory, serves a similar purpose — it doesn’t let us forget what civil war can do to people, and what people can do in a civil war.
Like Bechara, Nawal later attempts to, but successfully assassinates a nationalist leader and is tortured in Kfar Ryat, based on the Khiam prison. When the twins walk through the prison we sense how they each process grief and trauma; Jeanne wants to confront the past, Simon initially believes he can ignore it. As he discovers; it is memorialised in their DNA.
Villeneuve initially worried about the filming of violence in the presence of Lebanese and Iraqi crew members, whose experiences of war remain fresh. However, they assured him that “it’s important that those sorts of stories are on the screen”, granting Villeneuve licence to lead the project with his stylistic and technical cinematic prowess. Yet, Incendies is impactful because its kernel of truth derives from the authentic foundation of Mouawad’s play. Here, it is worth noting that Villeneuve’s recent two-part success Dune (2021; 2023) was bitterly undercut by its appropriation of South West Asian/North African (SWANA) cultures. These cultural influences remain unacknowledged, only furthered by the lack of on-screen representation which begs the question: does Villeneuve do justice to Lebanon in Incendies? Canadian-French Villeneuve situates the viewer in the point-of-view of the twins who visit their mother’s homeland (filmed in Jordan, a different landscape to Lebanon) for the first time. Like the twins, Villeneuve confronts his ignorance with humility, never feigning the insider perspective. Instead, he embraced his positionality by rewriting the screenplay on set after listening to Arab voices, which lends Incendies its authenticity.
In a screening in Beirut, audience members told Villeneuve that they’d show the film to their children as testimony to what they’d endured: “We never talk about this part of our history…it’s such a taboo era.” Incendies precisely interrogates these taboos, triggering something unsettling but also visceral in the viewer.
After uncovering the vertiginous truth of their mother’s past, Simon asks Jeanne: “Can 1+1=1?”. This fatalistic equation has multifold meaning to the twins, but it reminds us that everything boils down to an inescapable past, and that war will always mark our national and personal histories. Like Jeanne, I left the film humbled by the knowledge that my mother’s eyes have seen more than I can fathom, that she has suffered in ways I may never know. And yet, my mother’s past shapes mine.
