Not perfect, but unmissable!

Rating: 8/10 (27 April 2011)

As two teenage siblings are making the funeral arrangements for their prematurely deceased mother, their faithful notary informs them of a very peculiar request that she has left to be completed before her burial. Her children are suddenly told that they have a brother and a father who are still living, and that they are to deliver a secret letter to each of them on her behalf.
This situation is succinctly communicated in a very effective opening scene of exposition, and indeed the difficult search of these young adults to find their lost relatives remains the central focus throughout the entire film. A niggling weak point of many critically-acclaimed European films is a frustrating ambiguity in storytelling and a lack of a properly paced narrative, both of which seem to have a certain sadistic purpose about them, as if the intention is to make things as hard for the audience to follow as possible. However, the early firm grounding of plot present here assists greatly with the accessibility, and so is far less discriminative.
The scenes making up the body of the piece proceed mostly with a masterful grace, coherence, intrigue and sophistication. The sister, Jeanne Marwan (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) is by far the more willing of the two to carry out their mother's dying wishes – her brother, Simon (Maxim Gaudette) merely responds with a moody male temper to the words in the will – and so, at least initially, we follow Jeanne, being shown extended flashbacks of the events from her mother's past that she discovers. In these scenes, we see Mrs Nawal Marwan fighting endlessly to survive in a world fraught with terror and violence, being the horrific religious and political conflicts in the Middle East of the 1970s. The challenges she faces make this one of those remarkably engrossing and poignant stories of hope bravery and love that are cinematic gold.
The final discoveries and revelations are again satisfyingly comprehensible, but definitely not for the faint-hearted viewer. Still, even if one finds the overall conclusion distastefully grotesque, there is still something to admire in the most apt direction from Denis Villeneuve and a splendid performance from Lubna Azabal as the mother. With a cast that also includes Rémy Girard, Allen Altman, Mohamed Majd and Abdelghafour Elaaziz, Incendies ("Scorched") may have the occasional patch of sluggishness and over-exaggeration, but you still owe it to yourself to see it.