Worthy Oscar nomination

Rating: Null/10 (27 April 2011)

This Canadian production that made it to the Oscar short list for foreign language category (French, for this particular one) has been widely acclaimed in film reviews in the two largest Canadian cities. It has been described in various ways as family drama, detective thriller and war atrocities. One mention that nobody omits is "Greek tragedy". To those who have some familiarity with this term, the mere mention may well be a spoiler, albeit perhaps not a completely conspicuous one. One, at least, compares this movie to Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's works ("Amores perros", "21 grams", "Babel") which I think is carrying it too far. A much more appropriate comparison is "Possession".
Like "Possession", this movie is structured along two time lines. In the present, a pair of grown-up twins tries to track down the past history of their recently deceased mother by journeying to a Middle East country (unspecified but quite obviously modelled after Lebanon). Running parallel is what happened two decades ago, revealing gradually the atrocities the mother had endured. Geographically, the two parallel narrations track the same itinerary. This is exactly the structure of "Possession" although in the latter, the time gap is a few centuries and the protagonists in the two sequences are not blood-related.
The plot is not complicated so I won't even go any further into details other than stating that the whole thing is started by a somewhat strange will of the mother. While the detective-suspense pull is indisputable, it would be going too far to call it a thriller. One thing to remember is that the original material is a stage play. While the movie makers have done a great job in translating stage experience into cinematic experience, the essence of the movie is still its thought-provoking quality. Here, different people may tune in to different aspects. Some would react strongly to the aforementioned Greek Tragedy element, through the deep anguish of the mother. Others, taking a more contemporary angle, see the abhorrence of war, twisting and warping human nature.
Having said that, I must compliment the movie makers on the arresting cinematic visual accomplishment in the movie. The desolate nature of some of the Jordanian (the filming location) landscape helps, but there is more. One frame that particularly registers is a burning bus (terrorists' doing) which is placed towards the left a little back at medium distance. The ominously dark column of smoke seems to have taken on a life of its own, a hideous, menacing serpent advancing to the front right of the screen. With compositions like this, who needs pathetically useless and senseless 3D. In the audio department, Radiohead's music has been deftly integrated into the heart-wrenching context of the movie.
The performance of Belgian actress Lubna Azabal as the mother in this movie has been so widely acclaimed that there is really nothing more that anybody can add. One critic offers "intensely soulful", a good summing up.