Incendies (2010) — I: On Structures and Cycles
*SPOILERS*
I’ll be looking at Incendies now, based on the eponymous play, with a focus on each character’s arc.
Villeneuve has a unifying narrative approach that threads most of his post-hiatus films, most of which applies to this film, tragic in its exploration of powerlessness and uncompromising in its revelation of truth. This is a story about characters confronting the societal and generational structures to which they are subject in order to realize how little they control.
Maze of Humanity
Villenueve’s characters are usually trapped in delusion, rats in a maze they don’t yet realize exists. All we can glean from the beginning of this film is that a mother has died (Nawal Marwan), her actuary is reading her will, and her children presumably have a reason to respond with callousness. Seriously her son Simon fucking hates her. The child who actually wants to hear her mother’s wishes (Jeanne) is portrayed as being more level-headed and animated by a desire for inner peace. So all we know is that these adult siblings feel justified in hating their mother, who has died and left them with the option to unpack her baggage (categorically also theirs). Mom’s actuary gives each a letter. A letter for Simon’s brother. A letter for Jeanne’s father. They are twins; neither knew they had a brother and neither has ever heard anything about their father. Hothead Simon is out right away, so the journey starts off just by the power of Jeanne’s search for truth. What we realize we are seeing at the start of this film is every character trapped in the tragic maze of the human condition.
Jeanne goes on a journey incrementally becoming aware of the socio-political climate that created her mother, Nawal. We see a parallel flashback storyline of her mother going through the same places that Jeanne visits, one by one.
A Son Lost to Society
Nawal was a young woman during the lead-up to the Lebanese Civil War. She fell in love with a Palestinian refugee, with whom she became pregnant and tried to elope, before they were stopped by her bothers in an honor-killing. First barrier she encounters — ethno-national structures. Nawal lives in Lebanon in the 1970’s, ruled by a Maronite Christian majority, increasingly feeling threatened by the Palestinian Shia population being displaced into Lebanon by Israeli military activity. As a result, the Shia minority of Lebanon now finds its numbers strengthened, to Maronite chagrin. After seeing her Shia partner killed, Nawal (a Maronite) is forced by the social structures of honor to give up her infant immediately after his birth.
There’s also an element of hegemonic masculinity at play here — a power structure that transcends the ethno-national. Her brothers take it upon themselves to kill her Palestinian partner and almost kill her, but for luck. She is then doomed to carry forth the pregnancy knowing she will not raise the child. Indeed, Nawal is a woman trying to survive in a world built by men, ruled by their insecurities and the resultant projection thereof onto others (Nawal, her late partner, and their child).
A Society Lost to War
Nawal is left with the emotional scars of a jaded maternity, the guilt of a mother that would abandon her child, and the anger of one forced to do so. It’s here that we find the roots of this film’s theme of generational trauma. Nawal’s actions once the Civil War kicks off are directly animated by her maternal guilt. She goes off in search of her estranged child only to find his orphanage in ruins. Here we see a mother, forlorn and desperate, navigating the structures that created her circumstances in a bid for control.
When Nawal witnesses the devastation wrought by a Maronite warlord in this Civil War on both the Shia orphanage that housed her son and a van full of muslim civilians trying to flee, she promptly aligns with the Shia rebellion. Already being a woman with a strong sense of justice and independence, this feels like a bid for control only to the extent that vengeance can. She’s upset with the social order and decides that if it stops a mother from raising a child then that order should be usurped. When she then points a pistol at and kills the Maronite Prime Minister (or whatever his title was), there’s a parallel with her brothers pointing a pistol at her earlier in her life. And the hard part to watch isn’t the violence but its aftermath. She ends up in a prison for women where she will learn the hard way how powerless one woman is when faced with structures bigger than her.
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Incendies Essay —
I: On Structures and Cycles
