FFTraveler Podcast: Interview with Incendies Director Denis Villeneuve

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Monday, 17 January 2011 20:40

Written by David D'Arcy

Unveiled at the Toronto International Film Festival, and now at Sundance for the American heartland public, Incendies scrutinizes the effects of war on generations that never witnessed it, even though they live with its consequences.

Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the Canadian-Lebanese writer Wajdi Mouawad’s play turns a brother and sister’s search for relatives into a tour of the scorched landscape of the Lebanese civil war of the 1970’s and 1980’s.

The film never identifies that country as Lebanon, but with the encroachment of war and terrorism into territories throughout the Arab world, Lebanon isn’t the only country whose name is synonymous with civil war.

In Incendies, on the death in Montreal of their immigrant mother (Lubna Azabal), the twins Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) begin digging through the past. The journey takes Jeanne to a country that looks a lot like Lebanon, where she finds that no one wants to talk.

Villeneuve’s film shifts back and forth across time as its story evolves from a revenge saga, to a search for family, to a gothic twist on the haunting wounds of war. In case you haven’t guessed, the wounds are easily reopened. The anguish gushes out. As the cliché goes, this is not for the weak of heart.

Azabal and Desormeaux-Poulin are extraordinary revelations as mother and daughter trapped in a spiral of revenge. (Just in case you’re starting to turn this into an Arab racial profile, let’s not forget Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, and Chechnya, or Liberia - the subject of .) Massacres are avenged with massacres by one side against another, and Villeneuve shows enough of those bloodbaths to make you feel and believe the horror.

Shot in Jordan (to replicate the country that “dares not speak its name,” to roll out another cliché ), Incendiesuses mountainous locations to portray a landscape from which refugees can’t escape. Ruined villages that looked like they were bombed yesterday remind you that a land was raped along with its people.

Villeneuve, 42, who adapted the original play, directs with an assurance and a feel for the fierce emotions that tore a beautiful country apart. The film points to great things to come from him, although its title won’t help get the word out. As French-Canadian titles go, the thriller Jaloux(Suspicions) by Quebecois compatriot Patrick Demers, also at TIFF 2010, tells you more.

I spoke to Denis Villeneuve at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. He talked about Incendies, and about working in the Middle East.

Listen Now!

{enclose VN-66.mp3}

• < Prev
• Next >