Incendies

Today would be Wajdi Mouawad's fifty-eighth birthday — born 16 October 1968 in Deir al-Qamar, Lebanon. Tonight's second film is what happened when his best-known play was turned into cinema.

The route runs backwards: stage first, then film. Mouawad wrote Incendies in 2003; in 2004 Villeneuve saw it performed at the Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montreal and said, "I had this strong intuition that I was in front of a masterpiece." He spent five years on the screenplay, rewriting all of the dialogue while keeping the structure and characters. Mouawad was initially reluctant to grant permission, agreed only after seeing completed scenes, later called the film "brilliantly elegant," and gave Villeneuve full credit.

A playwright handed his country's story to someone who had never lived there — and that fact is part of the film. Villeneuve acknowledged his unfamiliarity with Arab culture and dealt with it by keeping the location deliberately unnamed. His framing is unusually candid: he wrote Radiohead's "You and Whose Army?" into the script from the first draft to make it "clear that [the film] will be a westerner's point of view about this world."

Forty-one years and two continents separate tonight's two films, but both begin with a funeral and both ask the same thing: does the next generation have the right not to look at what it inherited.

Nawal Marwan 在加拿大去世。她生前话很少，几乎不谈自己的过去。宣读遗嘱时，她的双胞胎孩子 Jeanne 和 Simon 被告知：母亲不打算要墓碑，也不打算要棺材——除非他们完成她留下的两件事。她留下两封信：一封写给他们的父亲（他们一直以为他早已死去），一封写给他们的哥哥（他们不知道他存在）。

Jeanne 决定去。Simon 不想去。两人对母亲的态度完全不同，而母亲留下的这条线索，只能两个人一起走完。

故事从此分成两条时间线：一条是姐弟在中东的寻找，一条是 Nawal 年轻时在那里的几十年。它们最终会合上，而合上的方式是这部电影最不希望被提前知道的部分。

Villeneuve spent five years on it. After seeing Mouawad's play in Montreal in 2004 he kept the structure and the characters but rewrote all of the dialogue — at one point he considered making it a silent film, abandoning the idea only because of the cost. That adaptation relationship is the film's subtext: a Québécois director filming a Middle Eastern civil war without pretending to be a local.

It treats a civil war as family history rather than news. The country is never named and the location is deliberately kept ambiguous, but the story's skeleton comes from the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–1990, parts of it drawn from a real person's life.

The form is the point. Cinematographer André Turpin and editor Monique Dartonne interleave two timelines so that "the mother then" and "the children now" answer each other; the two Radiohead tracks from Amnesiac function as narrative devices, not score.

The performance carries the weight. Lubna Azabal was thirty when she played Nawal, a role spanning four decades; she won Best Actress at both Canada's Genie Awards and Belgium's Magritte Awards. Villeneuve called the casting the hardest part of the film and had considered using two or three actresses for the one character.

Acclaim and criticism arrived together. 91% on Rotten Tomatoes from 124 reviews and 80 on Metacritic; eight Genie Awards including Best Motion Picture, Best Director and Best Actress; and it remains the only film to have won both the Toronto and Vancouver awards for Best Canadian Film. The criticism is just as clear — charges of melodrama and of orientalism. Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars, writing that "it wants to be much more than a thriller and succeeds in demonstrating how senseless and futile it is to hate others because of their religion," and picked it to win the foreign-language Oscar. It lost to Denmark's In a Better World.