Trial By Fire
Directed by Denis
Villeneuve
At Lincoln Plaza and Sunshine cinemas
Runtime: 130 min.
Abbas Kiarostami
might have made Incendies. Olivier
Assayas, too—maybe. Incendies
director Denis Villeneuve’s artistic commitment embarrasses the recent
high-profile Certified Copy and Carlos because he hasn’t gone chic. Incendies dares emotional sincerity in
its story of a Middle East immigrant (Lubna Azabal) who charges her surviving
children to find their brother and father. Villeneuve folds the mother’s
history within the siblings’ search, eloquently connecting the past to the
present in a way that makes politics and morality matter.
It’s a remarkable
achievement, especially considering the film’s deliberate vagueness about time
and place. Villeneuve adapts a stage play by Wajdi Mouawad that emphasizes the
human impact of politics, religious division and war. Unlike Kiarostami’s
rarefied inertia or Assayas’ apathy, Villeneuve provides an urgent response to
topical issues. Incendies (French for
“destruction by fire”) examines the injury individuals suffer in war that
extends globally and through the generations.
This “scorching”
characterizes a Post-9/11 truth. Villeneuve shows Old World terrors exported
into the future and new territories—Incendies
is set in Canada, a place of relative neutrality, still not safe from
devastating consequences. Every scene of distant anguish hits home through
Villeneuve’s artfulness. He’s clearly learned from Kiarostami—the Middle East
scenes (shot in Jordan) make the landscapes numinous—and from Assayas—the
temporal, spatial transitions are beautifully fluid. Modern settings are
animated with conscience as in Spielberg’s Munich.
Over all, Villeneuve shows the powerful resonance of time and place that
distinguished The Godfather: Part III
as a modern epic of modern, contemplative solemnity.
All that prevents Incendies from being as great as the
best films it evokes is its blatant schematics. But Villeneuve’s elegant
filmmaking remains impressive and the central performance by Lubna Azabal (who
carries her own resonance from Paradise
Now and André Téchiné’s Loin) is
strong. Azabal wears suffering yet her eyes remain avid, she acts/feels with
every scintilla. Similar faithfulness is seen in Villeneuve’s methods, as when
a montage of b&B slides taken during a Middle East riot recalls the
committed artifice of The Battle of Algiers.
That’s uncommon sophistication.