Denis Villeneuve and Incendie

Hey guys,

Today, I would like to talk about another Canadian director: Denis Villeneuve.

Denis Villeneuve did not direct a lot of films. He started in 1998 with “Un 31 août sur la Terre”, or An August 31st on Earth, and then directed Maeström in 2000, and Polytechnique in 2009. But he is mostly famous for his last film “Incendies”, adapted from the very famous Wajdi Mouawad drama.

I am extremely surprised to know that this movie has only had about 300,000 entries in France, because I actually loved this movie, it might be my favourite film of 2011, and it has been considered as one of the ten best films of 2011 by the New York Times.

The film tells the story of a middle-eastern Christian woman named Nawal, who dies after a stroke at the swimming pool. In her final requests, she asks her son Simon and her daughter Jeanne to go back to Lebanon, where she comes from, to find their lost father and brother.

The movie follows Jeanne’s journey in Lebanon, where she tries to understand what her mother’s life was like twenty years before, and why she has a hidden brother and a lost father.

The movie contains a lot of flashbacks that explore Nawal’s past during the Lebanese civil war, when Muslims and Christians were fighting.

I really loved the way that the story and its resolution are progressively distilled in the film. It both takes the viewer to the past, with Nawal, and explores the present, with Jeanne and Simon. Villeneuve succeeds in making us being closer and closer to each of the characters, to get attached to them, and when the twist arrives at the end of the film, there is a real emotional discharge that we have to face.

I know that many of the people who had read the play or seen it staged by Wajdi Mouawad were a bit disappointed by Denis Villeneuve’s film. It made me want to read the play as soon as possible (which I haven’t done yet) and, if I am lucky, to see Mouawad’s staging when it is rescheduled.

So, what did you think of this movie? Did some of you read the play before or after having seen the film?