Promising, but disappointing

Rating: Null/10 (30 August 2011)

The beginning was marvelous. You could tell this came from a play, because the weight of everything hung from words alone - the incredible malediction the mother pronounced on herself, and the contrasting reaction of the two children. Now that I think of it, there are elements of a fairytale in that beginning, present in the task set before the children much as Aladdin is sent for the lamp or Cinderella to clean, and this may - if not justify - provide insight to the structural failures further on; but, as I said, the latter half of the film is a disappointment.
"Incendies" is about a brother and sister, twins, who are sent by their mother via her will to search for their father and their brother. This journey reveals, via flashback, the mother's ordeal in an unnamed Arab conflict (Christianity vs Muslim, as usual), and is capped by the revelation that the father and brother are the same person. War is so horrible that it causes even this sort of thing to happen, but whereas the mother can't survive this last atrocity (the realization makes her literally will herself to die), her children can live on.
The message, as it were, is all well and good, but the film as a work of art that clarifies life by being an artifice doesn't work for me. It's not that characterization in itself is missing: the children are flat (flatter, at least, than Nawal, who isn't exactly a masterpiece of characterization), and that's kind of an empty promise on the life after war, isn't it? Aren't they just two springboards that serve, in the story, solely to dig up the past? Towards the end, characters such as the lawyer are mobilized like chess pieces, and we find out that Nawal was almost a mythic figure in the jail, "The Woman Who Sings" -- some sort of superhero. Things fit together too well, a bit like Nawal's outfit, with her rather stylish jeans and jacket; indeed, the revelation at the end, with the silly bit of dialogue from the brother ("One and one... how can they make one??"), couldn't transcend its tawdriness. It's like Disney meets Oedipus Rex.
The movie was still entertaining and had moments, of course, of grandeur. But ultimately disappointing. Glad I saw it on the plane.