'Incendies' Filmmaker Takes On War In A Fictional, But Very Real, Middle East

posted on: May 16, 2011

Although “Incendies’’ is based on a 2005 play, the movie could hardly be more timely. The drama, which opens Friday in Washington, turns on internecine conflict in a Middle Eastern country, evoking contemporary events in the Arabic-speaking world.

The film’s French Canadian director, Denis Villeneuve, acknowledges its relevance but seems uneasy. “This film has no historical value at all,” he cautions. “It’s a total fiction.’’

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That’s not precisely true. Adapted from Wajdi Mouawad’s acclaimed play, the movie is indeed set mostly in a fictitious land. But that nation is easily identified as Lebanon, and characters and events in the script are derived from the country’s 1975-1990 civil war.

Already an unlikely hit in Canada, the movie was one of the five finalists for the 2011 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. (It’s in French and Arabic.) Yet Villeneuve, discussing the movie over lunch recently at a Georgetown hotel, emphasizes the project’s improbability.

“It was not really a good idea for a Canadian director to make a film about war in the Middle East,’’ the 43-year-old filmmaker says. “I know nothing about Arab culture. I mean, I know some things. But I was not an expert at all! And I know nothing about war. It was really what the play was saying about family that attracted me so much.’’

Villeneuve first attended “Incendies,’’ known in English as “Scorched,’’ without any professional motive. But “I was totally astonished by the power of the story. I went out of the theater knowing I would do a film of it.’’

Staged minimally, the play conjured snipers, assassinations and bloody reprisals entirely with dialogue. The movie makes the violence graphic, notably during a merciless attack on a bus full of women and children.

Yet the filmmaker “tried to keep the mythic quality,” he says. “That’s what I loved in the play, was the equilibrium between modernity and a Greek tragedy.’’

Mouawad’s story follows two adult Lebanese Canadian twins, Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette), as they obey directives in their mother’s will. The document leads Jeanne, and ultimately Simon, from Montreal to Lebanon, where they learn things about their mother that she had never confided.

“Mouawad used both twins to show us the two reactions people can have to the past,’’ the director says. “Simon thinks you can live the present without thinking about the past. And Jeanne instinctively thinks that she has to know, in order to grow up.’’

Although Villeneuve’s script trims much of Mouawad’s language, the director recognizes that the movie remains “very theatrical . . . it flirts with melodrama all the time.” He even considered making “Incendies’’ as a silent movie. “In order to be really faithful, in a way, to Mouawad’s poetry, the perfect way would be to make a film without words at all. Just images inspired by his words.”

Filming in Jordan, Villeneuve worried about the story’s violence. He wondered if the brutal scenes would be too raw for a crew that included Lebanese and Iraqis. “It was a huge responsibility to film those war scenes in front of people who had been in a war a few months ago,’’ he says.

“But they said, ‘No, for us it’s the opposite. It’s important that those sorts of stories are on the screen.’ ”

And after a screening in Beirut in March, he recalls, “a lot of people said to me that we should show this film to their children, to show them what they had been through. They said, ‘We never talk about this part of our history. They teach history to the children up to 1975. After that, it’s a taboo era.’ ”

Confronting such taboos is clearly part of the project’s appeal to Villeneuve, whose previous movie, “Polytechnique,’’ dealt with the misogynistic gunman who killed 14 women at the University of Montreal in 1989. “It’s a very traumatic event that nobody wants to talk about in Quebec,’’ he says.

Although he calls “Polytechnique’’ and “Incendies’’ “very different,’’ both share the themes of anger and violence against women. “Those two films were quite tough to do,’’ Villeneuve notes. “I hate violence. My main relationship with violence is fear.’’

The filmmaker pauses over his corn-crab chowder. “I think I need a break now,’’ he muses.

Mark Jenkins
Washington Post