DVD: Incendies

Watching Incendies leaves you winded. Although it can be read as a thriller, Incendies is a drama that offers no hints of where it’s going. When it gets there, it hits hard. It’s about more than Middle East conflict, more than a search for identity. As director Denis Villeneuve puts it in one of this DVD’s extras, Incendies is a “Greek tragedy with a thriller inside it”.

Based on a Wajdi Mouawad play which premiered in Montréal, the scope and the use of sudden explanatory, digressive flashbacks are cinematic rather than theatrical. Although there are very few characters in the film, and the head-to-head interaction seems rooted in theatre, it’s impossible to trace the path back to how it might have originally been seen and interpreted on stage. Villeneuve must have opened out Mouawad’s creation.

Incendies has already been reviewed on theartsdesk, so its release on DVD offers a chance to reflect on what brings this film its power. Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in the 2011 Academy Awards, Incendies lost out on the Oscar to Denmark’s In a Better World. It has picked up numerous other awards though. Both films have conflict, violence and civil unrest at their core. Both feature warlords. Both don’t place themselves geographically: In a Better World’s European conurbation is anytown Denmark, Incendies’s Daresh could be Beirut. But Incendies is darker, its take on the horrible things seen drier, almost reportage. This distance, the lack of making a moral case, forces the viewer to engage, to make choices about what might be good, might be bad.

The DVD extras are the UK cinema trailer, a PowerPoint-style Q&A with Villeneuve and an Al Jazeera item on the film, where Villeneuve takes questions from an audience. The latter is short, but revealing. Villeneuve says that Mouawad told him that making the film would take its toll: “When I wrote the play I suffered a lot, and you will suffer also.” The power remains.

• Incendies is released on DVD and Blu-ray on 12 September, 2011
• Find Incendies on Amazon

Watch Denis Villeneuve discuss Incendies

{youtubejw}z2Ub_K3ObB0{/youtubejw}