incendiiiiiiiiiiiies

Most movies consist of taking an idea, like a romance, and putting it in a box. That is to say ideas are given a narrative and an assortment of coincidences to usher things along. In When Harry Met Sally Harry and Sally’s love (idea) is fuelled by happenstance shenanigans (narrative) and their unrivalled habit of running into each other (coincidences). Peoples’ lives in those movie boxes are a purposeful march towards some kind of closure or at least a new frontier, like Harry and Sally’s marriage. Things only ever happen to advance or complicate the idea of their love, and the world is only relevant as a cute, sexy or dramatic background for their shenanigans. Weddings, bookstores and new years parties are not weddings, bookstores and new years parties, they are props for the idea of Harry and Sally’s love. Everything fits together in Harry and Sally’s love box, everything happens for a reason.


Maybe it was inevitable that war would be stuffed into that tidy box, that guns and burned out orphanages and rape would be marshalled as chance props for a fabulous, ultimate metaphor for wartime suffering, but it’s still extremely unfortunate that Incendies had to do it. Nawal Marwan does the suffering as the supreme innocent; she transcends religious divides and has forbidden love affairs with refugees and really, really loves her son. Her war takes place in a made-up Arab country in 1970, which I found kind of sickening – there’s something callous about generalizing to invent a universal war for the universal victim, about using charred buses and dead children to create a formula of war and suffering, as if to say the unique horror of every tragedy is replicable, that the filmmaker could give you an average atrocity.


What’s worse is that Incendies uses those atrocities the way When Harry Met Sally does seating arrangements on a plane, it makes coincidences into narrative fate. Which is despicable because it means justifying them on some level, because when you narrativize dead children you argue that they are dead for a reason, dead so Incendies can conclude declaring that “the circle of hate is broke,” or some other fabulously self-congratulatory Disney shit. Marshalling the battered bodies of war victims into a parade of scripted progress towards a flashy denouement is schmaltzy and manipulative and fucked up because the death of a child, for example, is completely and exclusively a random and purposeless death. There is no reason for that death.


But Incendies makes its victims march in life and death alike. It begins its contemptibly rigorous story in a notary’s office. Nawal Marwan’s twin children, Jeanne and Simon, have been summoned there because their recently deceased mother has left them a sort of treasure hunt. They are each given a letter and a picture of her and are told that the father they thought was dead is alive and that they have a brother they never knew existed. Finally, they are told that there are two more envelopes for them to deliver to their father and their brother once they find them. It’s a nifty setup with an almost mathematical air. And that’s the problem, of course, because their mother’s past is a war, and fine parchment and neat French prose are not the ways to address it. It’s diabolically tidy, but tidy nonetheless.


And that’s disgusting and wrong because it approaches war with an equation in hand, as if fate strategically strews the bodies in a mass grave. But that is how Incendies sees war – it crowns a particular cell in a prison of hell an article of destiny, for example. Later in the movie when Simon is trying to make sense of the preposterous narrative of his mother’s life he mumbles to himself in bewildered horror about how 1 plus 1 could equal 1. This return to equations, this idea that any life, let alone one in a war zone, can be summed up in some dashingly nonsensical math problem, is the essence of why Incendies is so grotesque. It’s unworthy of depicting human suffering; it uses its characters like the variables in a formula. Everything adds up, and you can leave the theatre with your exquisite misery in a fine little box.