Dennis Villeneuve’s Incendies is a weak piece of work that matches its source material neither in poetry, nor in intensity of emotion, the result being its most popular criticism: ‘the plot seeming to be contrived and far-fetched and too unrealistic’. Because even in the pursuit of realism, the apparently acclaimed auteur, Denis Villeneuve shied away at the end of the day. Some say the movie does more in placing the story in a historical and geographical context, an archaeological site ‘to excavate the recent history of a single war-torn Middle-Eastern country. Yet the film wouldn’t take even the half-hearted effort to name this country, or name its neighbouring country, or the conflict. On the contrary, it goes out of its way to remove the whole quintessential war-crimes tribunal scene in an international court, that is in the original play.
Sure people have praised Villeneuve’s film, but there’s one problem: these people haven’t read the original theatre play by Wajdi Mouawad. For if they did, they would find that everything that is the heart and soul of the play, is missing in the film. All of its strongest elements. It’s like Villeneuve borrowed the plot of the play, the skeleton of it, for his film. Usually when a filmmaker does that, it is because it is a convenient excuse for them to say through the medium of film whatever they want to. Just as Hearts of Darkness was a convenient skeleton for Francis Ford Coppola to hang his Vietnam War commentary on. However, here, having stripped the play of its theatricality, poetry, vigour and emotion, Villeneuve does very little with the skeleton. He gives us the skeleton almost as is, and the fact that it still makes an engaging thriller, is a compliment on the impeccable structure and quality of the skeleton, whose architect is Mouawad, not Villeneuve.
Talking of missed opportunities, let’s go through some of them. I had some qualms about whether to list them, but 3 out of 5 moviegoers won’t read a theater play, so there’s very few people who would be spoiled by reading this review further. I shall go into tiny details in order to highlight the differences and the impacts they have, so bear with me. If you have seen the movie and wish to read Mouawad’s original play written for stage, then you may stop reading beyond this point because if you thought the movie was shocking, the play will electrocute you.
To start at the very beginning, at the reading of the will, the lawyer reads the mother’s elaborate burial ritual to be followed after her death. The son is visibly disturbed and embarrassed by it, and it strikes a chord with him so bad he resorts to call his own mother a ‘fucking bitch’, a ‘slut’, a ‘cheap cunt’, and other emphatic and animated abuses to express his anger toward his eccentric mother. Whoever knows the story and how the rest of the hour plays out, this reaction adds a special layer of tragic irony and dark humour matched by very few other pieces of fiction. It is a very important piece of dialogue in the mother-son dynamic in the story and holds special significance and develops special meaning as the story develops. However, what does the movie do with it? It turns it down a notch; it turns it down several notches. You can still say it delivers its purpose, but that is it and nothing more. This is only the first of many instances where the filmmaker deliberately chose mediocre over extraordinary storytelling.
Simon (the brother) also complains about their mother referring to him and his sister as ‘the twins’ or ‘twin brother’ and ‘twin sister’ and ‘the offspring of my flesh’ as if they were ‘a pile of shit she had to get rid of’. This is fitting dialogue in a story that deals with the horrors of birth-giving, reproduction, and rape. The words their mother uses to refer to her children, and their subsequent reaction holds a very important subtext into the mother-children relationship that we never see, but is established throughout the story. Yet again the film disappoints by cutting it all out. Perhaps the brother’s reaction in the film is more ‘realistic’ since that is what Villeneuve’s movie is trying to be, but comes off here as a bad decision. It cannot be called lazy because if it were, then the dialogue would’ve just been picked up as is from the play itself, which would’ve served the film better.
Coming to the burial: while the play not only actually shows the ridiculously specific burial but also the humour that is intrinsic to the execution of such a bizarre ritual, the movie completely skips this perfectly written scene that is full of mystery, humour and tragedy, without calling at itself. It deprives us of the very strong image of Nawal’s burial.
Not only this, it deprives us even of the image of Nawal’s grandmother’s burial. When her grandma helps her escape, she makes Nawal promise that she will learn to read and write. Nawal keeps that promise to her grandma and comes back to her village to engrave her name on a stone and put it at her grave, the first time a woman having ever done so in her village. However, the movie skips this whole bit, and falls short generally of the importance of education in an impoverished, civil-war torn society. As a result, the film also fails to highlight the significance of Nawal’s work in the newspaper before everything went downhill for her. The film does not seem interested in anything beyond the events that happen. The film rarely seems to be interested in its central characters as people, rather simply as parts of a plot of theatrical proportions, as victims, whose lives never rise above the tragic deed that befell them, whose entire personalities are defined by their victimhood, eternally stuck in the vicious cycle of their own heinous acts and bad fate. The result is, throughout the film, even as Simon and Jeanine learn of their mother, there is a feeling of bizarre unbelief, of ‘too much contrivance’, hence the most popular criticism of the film.
This is evident in perhaps the biggest loss of the film: the total and complete absence of Nawal’s friend, Sawda. Inspired by the act of Nawal inscribing her grandmother’s name on a stone, of seeing a woman write for the first time, Sawda latches on to Nawal, stubborn to learn the alphabet from her. The two walk through villages together, share each other’s stories, secrets and struggles. It is a resounding friendship that both of them lean towards when they are captured and separated. It is Sawda who teaches Nawal to sing, it is with their conversations, we really get an insight into the dread of life, the very dead that they are in the middle of, that they left behind, and that which awaits them. Sawda sees some colours in this stark life when she sees Nawal write on the stone on her grandmother’s grave. She says:
“I get up in the morning, and people say ‘Sawda there’s the sky’, but no one has anything to say about the sky. They say, ‘there’s the wind’ but no one has anything to say about the wind. People show me the world, but the world is mute. And life goes by and everything is murky.”
It is through Sawda, that we learn the bleak hopelessness of this world. Through Sawda, we feel for the first time, the dread of living through a civil-war, of what it means, really to be a refugee. The movie, however, is not interested at all in spending a little time with these things. It completely ignores Sawda, for which I have found no justifiable reason yet, and just speeds through Nawal’s journey through the vast, mysterious middle-eastern lands. The play stresses on the ability to forget and put behind horrific things that happen, with the passage of time, but the movie cannot be bothered with showing any of these fine details that bring out the truly horrific nature of this story. Perhaps it is unfair to expect a skilled ‘sculpting in time’, which is achieved by very few directors in cinema, from someone as unimaginative as Villeneuve.
Lines like “I’m your sister, not your brother. You’re my brother, not my father!” have a special meaning when we find that a twin sister said it to her brother, who had a third elder brother who was also their father. Familial relations, social and biological, are throughout moulded, morphed, challenged and mocked in the most wry humour possible when dealing with such a heavy subject; and yet, the audience of the film adaptation are deprived of this brilliant achievement in drama. In any case, the praises of the play itself deserves a separate essay.
Coming back to the film: when the story reaches its high point by the end of the third act, the reactions are mixed. Of Course it is shocking, but does it work? The most common criticism is that it is too much of a coincidence that gets in the way of suspending disbelief, and Janine, Simon and Nawal end up again as characters on a screen, with a tangible distance from the audience. Why is that so? After Janine goes through her own personal journey, literally and figuratively, in the past, to find out more about her dead mother, she finds out that she was raped in prison, and that she and her twin brother were born out of that horrific act. Through the local warlord, they find out that he just as he helped Nawal flee to Canada, he also helped her torturer and rapist flee to Canada, and through a series of really headache-y, far-fetched and contrived series of events, the two again bump into each other in Canada, and if that wasn’t enough, yet through another series of even more unbelievable and completely unrealistic chain of events (a complete breaking off from the minimalist style of storytelling) Nawal finds out that it was her son who raped her. Even then, as she recognises him, he does not recognise her at all, the woman he raped everyday for many days in that prison. Yet when you sit through all this and the initial shock of the film washes away, some very logical questions involuntarily surface, like: why did the mother use such a torturous, roundabout way to tell her kids all this?
The play, however, does not have to face these questions, since they’re dealt with in a more than satisfactory manner in the story itself, and it’s telling. In the play, Nawal finds out that her rapist was in fact her son, at the war crimes tribunal, a scene which the movie cowardly cut out. As he confesses to all the crimes he has done, he puts on the clown nose that his mother left with him after she gave him birth. That’s when Nawal finds out. This is such a powerful moment in the play, that the choreographed stage action written on paper evokes such a strong image, of the twins, their father and brother, and Nawal all together, Nawal Marwan, sixty years old, with all her kids. This is then followed by the climax, the opening of the two letters written by Nawal, one to the father of the twins, and one to the brother.
This is a testament to the poetic geist of Scorched, one that is grossly insulted at every level in the movie. Even the scene transitions are better in the play than in the movie. The way the play uses the grammar and tools of the stage to move back and forth in time, the way it uses sound to create immersion, the sound of a phone call, a jackhammer, a distant cry of an adult daughter to her young mother, and that of an old mother to her lost son in the future, none of this, sadly, we see in the film.
The play is a delicate, poetic, romantic odyssey, while the film plays like political cutouts pieced together. When the movie ended, the overarching feeling was that I had seen something profound which was botched or somehow not delivered with the intensity the subject matter demanded. It is honestly a scary thought to imagine, and go through as an artist: the fact that you may not be able to deliver on par with your subject matter. I was shocked when some described the film as more historical, geographical, politically concrete and ‘realistic’, when in fact the film not only cut out the international tribunal scene, it shied away from even mentioning the country the story takes place in. Somehow the filmmakers did not find it necessary to put the place on a map. The general view is that long stretches of sand dunes, makeshift huts, ruins of stone buildings are enough to get the point across. They’re all the same country. Who cares about the people and their cultures anyway, right? This film is a rigid piece of work. It is nowhere: neither a realistic thriller, nor a poetic odyssey, it is neither here, nor there. It is an opportunity wasted.
How then, springs the question, is the movie so well received? Its stunningly outstanding critical reception is almost inexplicable. I only saw this film because of how constantly it appears on countless movie lists, and is regarded as one of the best films of the 21st century, a masterpiece, and so on. The only explanation for it, then, is that these moviegoers have not read or seen the original play from which this movie is made. Isn’t this then, evidence of the alarming provincial arrogance of the cinephile? Showing complete ignorance of the other arts from which it shamelessly borrows and then celebrating not only a mediocrity, but truly a spectacular achievement of underwhelm and unimagination. I am still not entirely convinced what accounts to such rave reception of such an abysmal adaptation of such a stellar piece of theatre. Perhaps more than anything, this underscores the significance of an multidisciplinary appetite for any artist.
If you want a real emotional rollercoaster with absolutely gut-wrenching prose, read Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched. If you’re looking for two hours of flat, lazily melodramatic ‘tragedy’ of outlandish leaps of suspensions of disbelief while calling itself realistic, watch Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies.
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