Quite the disappointment

Rating: Null/10 (4 September 2019)

First of all, in my opinion, Denis Villeneuve is one of the greatest film directors of our time. Blade Runner 2049 and Enemy are some of the greatest films in recent memory, but this does not mean that all of his work has to achieve the same threshold of brilliance or even the the slightest bit of ingenuity. One such miss, I believe, is the 2010 movie Incendies.
The plot follows Jeanne, a young up-and-coming mathematician, and her twin brother trying to uncover the mysterious life of Nawal, their deceased mother, and fulfill her last wish of giving a letter to their lost father and brother respectively. What we end up with is a melodramatic retelling of Sophocles's immortal tragedy Oedipus Rex with a somewhat meaningful commentary on religious extremism and the destructive power nationalism on the side.
I believe that most problems of the film reside with the stupidity and the lack of foresight of Jeanne and her brother, impossible coincidences and the dubious motivations of of their mother. First, we know that Jeanne roughly knows how much and at what time did Nawal spend in the unnamed Middle Eastern country. We find out for ourselves the moment she visits the old university from Jeanne herself. Later on she finds out for how long Nawal spent time in prison from the school janitor and that she was raped and impregnated there. It is at that time that she found out that she got pregnant there as well. The twins age align perfectly with the time table given by the film. One would think that a mathematical prodigy like Jeanne would at least suspect a correlation, but no. What we get instead is an hour more of beating around d the bush culminating in the overrated and predictable reveal worthy of any Turkish/Spanish soap opera, i.e. that their brother is also their father, which brings me to my second point: the coincidences. Nawal just happens to unknowingly find her son in a prison who just happens to rape and impregnate her and there is obviously the moment when she conveniently stumbles upon him at the swimming pool where she could identify him by the tattoo on his heel in a completely different country almost twenty years later. This is some Star Wars level coincidence nonsense here. Thirdly, I simply reconcile Nawals need to tell the truth to her son. The film goes out of it's way to establish that Nihads personality is almost completely a product of the environment that he was raised in. This is something that Nawal certainly had the capacity to understand. We even see that Nihad made and active effort to become a functioning part of the society after leaving The Middle East. But thanks to the terrible realization of what he had done, his efforts will most certainly fall apart as he descends into a never ending cycle of guilt. I simply cannot find a way to justify Nawals choice of action. Sometimes, ignorance truly is bliss.
Although I believe that ultimately there is more good than bad about the film, there are some interesting aspects of it. The acting of Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin is great and at moments superb. Social commentary had quite a bit of potential, but even this, I believe, was not explored to its fullest extent.
All in all, I find this movie to be a complete mess and an overall disappointment.