Incendies

A notary public is tasked with delivering two cryptic letters from his former administrative assistant's will to her adult twin children, one mentioning the father they thought dead, the other, the brother they never knew they had. The children receive the letters with opposite reactions, Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) setting out to the Middle-East in search of her father, Simon (Maxim Gaudette) refusing to take them seriously. With hardly any corresponding information and no working knowledge of Arabic, Jeanne resiliently makes her way from cryptic clue to startling fact while encountering the cold face of historical prejudice. When Simon and the notary public (Rémy Girard as Jean Lebel) finally arrive, everyone comes closer to discovering the truth.

The narrative travels back and forth through time, presenting Jeanne and Simon's mother (Lubna Azabal as Nawal Marwan) as she struggles to survive, and her children as they try to piece her life together. At first I found this device frustrating, wanting to spend more time focusing on Jeanne and Simon and theorize my own version of Nawal's past through their discoveries. But as the stories blend together, the delicate pacing, intergenerational tracings, and temporal effacings stoically reinvest the concept of adventure with a spiritual intellectual assiduity that rarely vouchsafes its resplendent presence (editing by Monique Dartonne).

Not bad.

Delivering serendipitous facts and inevitable allusions which hauntingly dispossess the eternal return of the same, Denis Villeneuve's Incendies interrogates time by historically condensing its contemporary space. The definition of sacred is re-calibrated and dematerialized within, its semantic distinction fluidly overflowing.

And what is all this worth if not for a chance to pursue something distant and arcane?

Heatstroke and heartache and lambastes and pulsates.

Deep down.