Incendies (2010)

Compiled notes.

There is no such thing as a “1+1=1 theory”. Simon was still confused (or rather in shock) about what he had just heard, and hence he was only able to express in an abstract but for him intuitive way about what was going on in his head, namely that one father (whom he never knew) and one brother (whom he never knew) turned out to be one and the same person.

Jeanne is an intelligent young woman and easily understood her brother’s metaphor (or rambling, if you will). Moreover they were twins who have been together all their lives, and also at that moment their minds were occupied with the same issues (their mother’s death and her past, the search for their father and their brother), so it’s only logical they would interpret things according to a similar frame of reference. Her understanding/knowledge of abstract math (or the fundamental axioms of math) only made things easier even, but wasn’t really needed for her to make the right connection. (However, the math motif throughout the movie served to highlight deeper themes in the story.)

Incendies (2010) : How did sheknow?

After having just viewed this uncompromisingly bold production I have nothing but praise for all who were involved in its making. The cinematrography, the acting, the direction, the scrpting, all have blended beautifully into an extraordinary piece of cinema. Now that I have that out of the way let me mention what I beieve is a fatal flaw in the plot……..

it has already been identified above but if I string it together here it might make some sense reading it in a single post. As a previous reviewer alluded to we didn’t see the rape scene. Either it was cut or most probably never filmed. The viewer is left with an obvious inference as to what has happened in the cell and in my opinion that is all that is necessary. I think at that time most of us are still settling down after scenes of children slaughter and buses with mothers inside going up in flames. So having not actually viewed the rape I believe it is safe to assume the torturer didn’t remove his boots to engage in his act. Therefore there is absolutely no way she knew who was violating her at the time. Her life continues until the moment she is struck by the sight of the tatooed heel in the swimming pool. It is only then when she confronts the guy that she is struck with the revelation. One thing is for certain, he didn’t have his face covered in the cell and a women would never, never, in her life be able to erase that face from her memory.

So that leaves us with the question, when were the letters written? Clearly not before the pool scene, unless she wrote them without the knowledge the rapist was her son. One letter was signed Whore 72 ( the letter for the father) and the other Prisoner 72 ( the letter for the brother ie., first son). So suppose that is the case. She writes the letters at some earlier point, and has them stored with her will, asking her twins to try and find their father who she of course knows was the prison torturer but never told her twins, and also find their brother independently who just vanished after he was born, and who likewise was never mentioned to the twins.

But that dosen’t make sense in the burial instructions, because if it was simply finding them, and we have to assume she didn’t have the knowledge that her rapist was her son, then why would she ask for such a burial ?

So the enigma now turns to the possibility that the letters had to be written after she recognized her son at the pool. But we are led to believe that she was very fragile, dying, and not even able to lift a pen. Unless of course she dictated them to the lawyer who then transcribed her wishes and embelished them with his own words.

He has a look on his face when he sees her.. kind of a smirk. Quite possibly that was done as an indication that he did recognize her — possibly. And if he did recognize her as his prisoner, he still didn’t know she was his mother and therefore he may have enjoyed the shocked/fearful look on her face. I don’t know, is that a stretch?
Re: How did sheknow?
image for user Wagahbond
by Wagahbond
» Tue Sep 20 2011 15:41:09 Flag ▼ | Reply |
IMDb member since May 2011
No, no, no.

You can clearly see it in her face that she doesn’t know her son is a rapist. She goes over there, hoping to see her son, and then you can see the dread in her face when she finds out he also is her rapist.

Why should she go over there at all if she already knew he was both her son and her rapist? That doesn’t make sense at all. You can see that she’s curious. If she knew that he also was her rapist, I guess she would just stay away and look at him to find out that it reallywas him and that he was in Canada.

I agree with Chuck. It seems totally clear to me that she didn’t know until she got out of the pool and saw his face (and no, he didn’t recognise her – she had been nothing more than an object to him back when he was her torturer, why would he remember her personally).
Later we see her whispering to her notary, I’m going to assume that she was telling him what she needed from him at that point, so he THEN got out paper and pen (which we weren’t shown)and either she dictated it to him or she managed to write it down. The letters weren’t long so not that difficult to do.
There is no other way the movie makes sense except that the letters were written after she saw him at the pool and went into shock. She obviously had a heart attack or something similar, knew she was dying, and got her affairs in order – which she only then fully understood herself.

…… Incendies (2010) : Manipulative garbage

Their lives were already messed up. Through the truth, they found a form of redemption. The mother had always been distant towards the twins, which had also put a strain on the relationship between the twins themselves; now the twins know ánd understand why, and that it wasn’t that she didn’t love them. So now the twins can start to mend their relationship. As for Abu Tarek, in my view he deserved to be faced with the truth.

The twins could never mend their relationship. They now know that their mother was horribly raped by their brother and that he is their father. There is no redemption to be found there, only misery. As far as Abu Tarek is concerned, he is a product of war… he was raised without a mother (we even learn that he wanted to find her, out of love), in a warzone and rasied as a soldier. If his mother had any kind of decency or love for him, she would never tell him what he did. She basicly destroyed a man who was already half destroyed by himself and his fate.

If you were a child soldier, raised without parents in a war zone and had been brought up with violence and rape being part of your daily life (which would explain why you did horrible things), and you had unknowingly raped your own mother and gotten her pregnant with twins – would you like to know? Or would you prefer to live the rest of your life NOT knowing this, while trying to keep together the new life that you have established for yourself? Sorry, but I’m not buying it. No sane person would have told their own son this.

Indeed, you raise a good question. Did the mother do the “right” thing? Who knows? Maby not. Maby he did. Thats up to the viewer to decide..

However, i fail to understand how this makes the movie bad? Just because you think the character chooses to do the wrong thing, you think the movie is bad?

Lots of people make bad decisions in movies just like in real life.

I had difficulty with this decision of Nawal’s too. And the only justification for it is that it was a story device on the part of the writers, in my opinion. It is feasible this terrible event could have happened and events like it probably have happened, but for the mother to send her children on a chase, where they could even have been in danger of losing their lives or violence of some sort, just to find out their rapist brother is their father is just terrible plotting and does rather make Nawal look pathologically callous. She may have needed to resolve her ambiguous feelings around her war-damaged son and could have done so without involving the twins. I think a better and more reasonable way to have told this story was for Nawal to have been hiding this knowledge from the twins, but a device of some sort used where the twins stumble on information that inspires them, of their own volition, to set out to find the truth after their mother’s death.

. Maybe the mother weighed her choices and decided it would be better if their children learnt the truth instead of living a lie. Was that the right choice? There is no right or wrong choice here; I would hate the news if I was in their shoes but I would still appreciate the truth. It is the primordial dilemma “bliss of ignorance” or “pain of the truth”? Do you want to know and be sad or not know and be happy? Which option has the greater value? And who can determine that?

I can’t agree, I find it sad that you have this opinion because I would consider this one of the best films ever made, a true masterpiece. It takes you on a journey and when you get to the end the dénouement is so much more shocking because of the feeling you’ve built up on that journey. Another commenter suggests Nawal’s roundabout way of telling her children what has happened is a plot device, enabling the film to tell the story for us; this is basically correct but so what? Remember, it is fiction. It is not meant to be totally realistic, totally how people really would act in a situation. If it was it would be boring and uninteresting to an audience as fiction. I personally don’t have a problem with her choice of how she let them know the truth anyway, instead of dumping it on them bluntly she let them find out bit by bit, travelling to the country and talking to witnesses, and who’s to say this is not a psychologically healthier way to digest this truth.

Remember, she presented two letters, one to their father and one to their brother. The implication being they were two different people. This is pointed, quite deliberate. Their journey was to find out they were to present them to the same person, which at first they could not conceive. They just knew there was someone who fulfilled each of these roles.

I also disagree that the ultimate message of the film is despair. She expressed love for her son in that letter. I don’t agree at all that the twins’ lives are ruined by this, that’s your assumption. People can recover from such things, and all the more if they their mother loved them. And why does this consideration even come into the question of whether this film should be made, or should have had this plot? Should there be no horror films or thrillers in which people die? Unpleasant stuff such as happened in this film happened regularly in Lebanon’s civil war. Why shouldn’t Lebanese filmmakers make films like this that so effectively get across to audiences far away who’ve never experienced the reality quite what awful emotional *beep* it put people thru. It’s very eliciting of empathy. You’re calling that ‘manipulative’ as if it’s a bad thing, but I think it’s fantastic.

It is quite curious that nobody brought up Oedipus in this debate and the use of the myth by Sophocles in Greek tragedy and by Freud much later.

Now my interpretation is that, though the whole movie follows the Ancient Greek tragedy pattern (“you can’t escape from your fate from the start”) especially through the way people are drifting without any control whatsoever of their own lives, balloted by events that are too powerful to counter, the final message is somehow one of forgiveness and hope.

This is why in the end Nawal addresses the same man in two ways, to the father, Abou Tarek, though he is a rapist and a torturer, out of his hate, two beautiful beings she came to love were born. So love managed to spring from hate… For that she forgives him and is somehow thankful.
To the son, Nihad of May, she has always loved him. So, unknowingly, the man who raped her and tortured her is a man she loved, like a son of course but it was love no matter how horrible his crime turned out to be. Then again Nihad/Abou Tarek had no way to know that he was committing incest. She knows that, as he learns from it, he who missed his mother so much, he will be overwhelmed by guilt (the Kindly Ones of Greek Mythology). As Nihad is punished by this revelation for giving into hate, his mother reminds him that, as a son, she still loves him.

And of course, the whole thing is also metaphorical of the whole situation in Lebanon, Christians and Muslims had been sharing the same language and culture (music, food etc) for centuries, they were “brothers” and all of a sudden politics (the problem of Palestinian refugees and the PLO terrorist activities, the fascist nature of the Christian Nationalist faction and manipulation by Syria and Israel…) initiated a cycle of violence and retaliations, a war that was more a vendetta on a massive scale, something fueled by hatred. A hatred that consumed Nawal and sent her to prison where she met her oedipian fate.

Unlike the Jocasta of the myth though, she doesn’t chose to kill herself. If the Gods’ curse is ultimately the cause for Oedipus’ demise, hatred and war are to blame for what happened to Nawal and Nihad. Nawal fights back in her own way, beyond death by teaching one last lesson to her three children.

As for how it ended, yes, upon first reveal of the brother/father connection, I also saw the mom’s death bed request as ultimately very destructive to her children, but in the reading of the delivered letters, we can see there was a real method to her “madness” and for me, it wrapped up the film in a somewhat hopeful manner. At the same time condemning the father for his actions, the letters forgive him as a son and helps paint the love connection (grandfather/father/children) that exists between the father and the children he never knew he had. How they all end up dealing with this information after the fact, we’ll never really know, but I think that’s the beauty of a film like this, slightly ambiguous at the close, but it ends with enough of an explanation and a defined tone to help us draw our own conclusions.

Well the whole point of the film is that she showed compassion as a mother and contempt as a prisoner. That was why he was given two envelopes. As a mother she never told him anything other than that she loved him unconditionally. As a prisioner and victim of systematic rape and abuse she told him the rest.

It’s this dual emotion that the film hinges upon as a twist and an emotional thread so if you didn’t pick up on this then that might be why the film didn’t fly for you.