Beautifully made tragedy but schematic, contrived.

Rating: 6/10 (30 July 2012)

Just watched it, hence the ramble... Such a beautifully-made film with terrific performances. I can see how many people find it an extremely powerful tragedy but I wonder if it tackles too much for its length and medium. There's only so much you can do and say in a 2 hour conventional-ish movie without overtly manipulating the audience.
Personally I have a problem with many fictional films of this type though I understand my reaction is not the common one. To me, these films take extremely shocking or despicable events which 'could be real' or 'could have happened' and 'do sometimes happen'. They film these events realistically but they ask the audience to dive in and get into the story as you would a piece of riveting fictional drama, The Godfather etc. At the same time they insist the film has elements of reality or quasi-documentary - to have 'this is almost truthful' or 'this is currently happening' qualities. Yet the screenplay, the unfolding drama, is only as real as a Greek tragedy, say - it is carefully scripted and story-boarded to shock and amuse and provoke. It's a play. A drama. A movie. It's still only another The Godfather or The Matrix. It's not a documentary or a record of an event or events which happened. It's like having your cake and eating it - taking an irony-filled, message-laden 'impactful' stage play and putting it in the package of a realistic contemporary action-drama thriller mystery tragedy.
I think if another director had played more on the fictional 'Greek tragedy', 'heightened ironic drama written for the stage' aspects I would have loved it. (Eg if the audience understood they were being manipulated for the sake of great drama.) Conversely I think if this director had made a similar movie based on a true story without the central shocking irony I would have loved it. He's a great director.
Not meaning to 'compare' different films and different intentions, and perhaps conflicting some of what I have said so far: I liked the way Roman Polanski's 'Death and the Maiden' keeps the stage play aspects of the original. I didn't enjoy 'The Kite Runner's mixing of fact and fiction, and then its action rescue ending. I'm a fan of some films which take real events and work them into drama and then finish by revealing the actual protagonist in real life - Europa Europa is an example. I'm a fan of City Of God only because it is so obviously a complete fiction, a 'Hollywood' style shoot-em-up, rather than a 'state of address'. I'm a huge fan of Sergei Bodrov's 'Prisoner Of the Mountains' as a film depicting some themes of war and religious conflict in a fairly realistic way but somehow with a nice balance between 'this is just a filmed play' and 'this is something happening right now which carries some universal truths'.
I don't comment that often on IMDb but I do think that for films of an extreme nature (such as Incendies' central twist) it is probably worth recording people's different reactions.
Finally, I do think the director is one of the best of recent times and congratulate him on the film despite it not being to my taste.