Forget ‘Arrival’ and ‘Dune,’ Denis Villeneuve’s Most Important Movie Is This Gripping War Drama

Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve and his trademark style don’t really require an introduction, but that wasn’t the case at the beginning of his directorial career. Still, his earlier works, both shorts and features, are illuminating representatives of his aesthetic and philosophical interests that would become staples of his later, more mainstream movies. One such early work is his often unfairly forgotten 2010 movie, Incendies, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and won many other prestigious awards. An absolutely harrowing drama, which Villeneuve manages to elevate to a genre that can rarely be encountered in film rather than theater or literature — a classic tragedy. Even in his previous films, such as August 32 on Earth, Maelstrom, and Polytechnique, the director touches on the themes Incendies is centered around. Like those works, Incendies is built around the same narrative engine: the protagonist clashes with some powerful force that they try but cannot rebut, and which changes their life irreversibly.

‘Incendies’ Is a Complex Mix of Genres, Delivering a Story That Is Both Modern and Timeless

Incendies starts off with an almost melodramatic setup: after Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal) has a sudden stroke and dies, her grown-up twin children, Jeanne and Simon (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette), are summoned to the reading of her will by the family friend and notary. The will reveals an unexpected demand for Nawal’s children to track down their biological father, whom they considered long dead, and their older brother, whom they had no idea existed at all. While Simon, who had a complicated relationship with his mother, initially balks, Jeanne embarks on a journey from Canada, where Nawal settled years ago, to her native (unnamed) country somewhere in the Middle East. Gradually, Nawal’s past is uncovered — a past filled with horrible violence, and a story that is both unique and terrifyingly universal.

Incendies is based on a famous eponymous play by Lebanese-Canadian author Wajdi Mouawad, which originally mixed psychological and family drama with a slowly unraveling mystery. The play was also largely inspired by classic tragedies, such as Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, which was partly what initially drew Villeneuve to it when he first saw the staging in 2004; a story that was both timeless and possessed a modern sensibility and relevance. For the screen adaptation, Villeneuve, who would become known for his work with scale, combining backgrounds of epic proportions with individual human stories, had to reconcile the original theatrical setting with his own cinematic language. In pursuit of this idea, Villeneuve demonstrated what would become his recognizable style in future works, founded on a skillful combination of stunningly looking wide shots and uncomfortable, often claustrophobic close-ups.

War Becomes the Main Villain and Monster in Villeneuve’s Unforgettable Drama

The story of Incendies is told through a non-linear structure that jumps back and forth, gradually revealing itself. This is, of course, partly in support of the mystery aspect of the film, since we, the audience, must unravel the heartbreaking truth about Nawal’s life and death together with her children. However, it is easy to see the hints of a grander meaning in that, as an effort to tell a story in a way not dissimilar to Alain Resnais‘ devastating 1956 classic, Hiroshima mon amour, where the collective memory of the Hiroshima bombing was intricately entwined with an individual nightmare a French woman endured during the war. At the very core, both the original Mouawad’s text and Villeneuve’s adaptation possess a strong anti-war tenor, which remains relevant today.

War is precisely that dark, elemental force that Villeneuve’s characters always encounter in some form (even the titles — Maelstrom, Incendies, meaning inflammation, fire — are very telling in this sense). It’s the unimaginable cruelties of war that shape the heartbreaking tragedies in the heroine’s life, turning the world upside down, reverting victims and the oppressed into aggressors and torturers, and back again, in a vicious cycle of violence. The depiction of war in Incendies and the effect of it are comparable to another anti-war classic, Elem Klimov‘s Come and See, which, despite its title, is almost impossible to revisit after experiencing it once. Witnessing the surrounding horrors turns the young hero into an old man in seemingly a matter of days. And while in Villeneuve’s film, Nawal’s emotional transformation (embodied at all ages by the amazing Lubna Azabal) from fierce rage to exhausted acceptance takes decades, the non-linear narrative helps to create an illusion of a similar effect.

‘Incendies’ Balances Beauty and Terror, Myth and Realism, Shaping Denis Villeneuve’s Style

Image via Entertainment One

Even though Lebanon and the events of the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990 are recognizable in Incendies, the war-torn country still notably remains unnamed. In the true fashion of the director, who would eventually come to strive more and more for poetic parables, even in his more genre-heavy works, such as Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, the story of Nawal and her children becomes universal. A story that knows no geographical or national boundaries, making the effect of it even more terrifyingly real. Incendies notably opens with a panoramic shot showing a landscape with a row of palm trees, before cutting to one of the characters we know nothing about yet. Preceding Villeneuve’s Enemy with its doubles and doppelgängers, the film then ends with a mirroring exterior shot of trees and a row of gravestones, including the one for Nawal, who, until the end, remains both the devastating symbol of the history lessons still not learned and a complex human being.

Such an effect becomes possible thanks to the magnificent performance of Lubna Azabal, who somehow not only manages to realistically impersonate her heroine throughout different ages, but also to show her as both a relatable, full-bloodied woman (partly based on a real-life former prisoner, Soha Bechara) and an almost mythological figure. While Azabal’s character is the bleeding heart of the film, there is another deeply resonating performance here. Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin plays Nawal’s daughter, Jeanne, in a subtle, understated way, which makes the revelations awaiting her all the more soul-crushing. After Villeneuve’s earlier works, most of which were also centered around female protagonists, the director fully establishes his penchant for creating complex heroines on screen. This creative tendency would seep into his further filmography, which will include some textured, interesting heroines — from Amy Adams‘ Louise Banks in Arrival to Ana de Armas‘ A.I. fantasy in Blade Runner.

Despite Incendies not being one of Villeneuve’s most well-known films, it’s still a great staple amid his body of work, and in a certain sense, his personal opus magnum. Not only did the film gain the director widespread international acclaim, allowing him to transition into making English-language movies with Prisoners and Enemy, but it laid the foundation for his cinematic world. Even though Villeneuve has worked in a variety of genres, the underlying principle on which all of his films are based is centered on balancing reality and myth. The beauty of the world and the horrors that lurk underneath it — something that is perfectly and heartbreakingly embodied in many shots of the deceptively peaceful, sunlit landscapes in Incendies. As Villeneuve is now set to direct the next Bond film, it might be hard to predict how exactly he will re-imagine the familiar character and the world around him. It is safe to say, though, that he is the perfect director to unearth everything that’s gritty, gruesome, and harrowing underneath all the classic coolness of the franchise.