Incendies

 Denis Villeneuve is the best director working today.  He has to be.  The man has steadily been producing gold through his career, with a few exceptions.  But I feel that in spite of this his movies are some of the most thought provoking and well constructed movies I have seen.  I mean Did Ya Ever Seen Incendies?

Incendies is Villeneuve’s most recent foreign language movie, after this started to work in the US and English language pictures and, to be honest, I can see why.  Incendies is such a powerful movie that it would open doors.  Incendies is so well made and designed you can see why Villeneuve got the Blade Runner 2049 job, or why they showed it to Ted Chaing when his story was optioned as Arrival.  This movie is significant.  It is incredible.

So the movie follows a woman tracing the steps of her mother through the Middle East to uncover her past.  It cuts between present day daughter and past mother.  See, the mother has died and has left her twin daughter and son to deliver a letter each.  One to their father and one to the brother they did not know they had.  The daughter accepts this challenge while her brother does not.  It is this journey we travel with, flashing back to the mother, Nawal, and then we move along with the daughter, Jeanne.  As we flashback we witness a terrible war in the unnamed Middle Eastern country.  This gives us one of the most incredible scenes.

The bus sequence.  If you have seen Sicario and the border crossing sequence then you know Denis Villenueve can masterfully construct a tense set piece.  For me, Incendies tops that.  It is so well done that most posters for the movie include the final image on it.  So we have Nawal, a Christian disguised as a Muslim refugee so she can travel in a Muslim bus.  The scene starts off steady enough but then the bus is stopped by Christian Nationalists.  The entire sequence has us placed in the bus with Nawal and this makes this scene so much more intense because of this.  The Christian Nationalists proceed to shower bullets into the bus and now we are on the floor with Nawal and a couple of surviving passengers, most notably a woman and her son.  Blood is running down the aisle and sweat is dripping from their faces.  We hear footsteps on the roof and some sort of fuel dripping down onto our survivors.  The mother and son are terrified and we are still on the bus with them.  Nawal takes out her cross necklace and takes the young boy from his mother, she is going to try and escape the bus.  Problem is the bus being set on fire.  We finally have a shot from the Nationalists POV.  Nawal, the screaming boy and flames slowly surrounding them.  Que, what seems like, an eternally long wait for the leading the Nationalist to decide their fate.

It's hard to give this scene justice here, especially the end.  I don’t want to over spoil this movie or the scene.  I hate to tease but this is a movie you need to experience.  The bus sequence is just one powerful scene out of the many.  

I understand that subtitles put a lot of people off but Bong Joon-Ho (director or Parasite) was right when he won his Academy Award.  ‘Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films’.  This would be an excellent place to start.