Incendies
Incendies is a 2010 movie by Denis Villeneuve exploring the theme of unforgivable crimes and immaculate perfection both orbiting the same tragic fate of some people who are simultaneously blessed and cursed, in a Greek-looking horror-machine of destiny unravelling in one of the most atrocious stages of contemporary history: the middle-east.
Although it does not directly address the question of God, this is a paradigm of the tension between the evil and the holy in this world, how one has to reckon with both the purest form of love and the most vicious hatred, the devotion and the destruction, the sacrifice and the murder. The resolution is that everything is tied together, love and hate are two faces of the same coin: we hurt those we love and we love those who hurt us. When given the total picture, everybody is the same victim of a tragic, tortured, mistaken unravelling of events which has no pure or evil people, only individuals with their own story, their own misery, their own trauma and mitigations for biting back, later to realize they had been biting at themselves in trying to maul those immediately around them, strangers perceived as a threat when they were instead companions or even the family they had been striving for all along.
Warning: Spoilers, read no further if you would prefer to discover the revealed bits by yourself.
The story uses as its background the sort of atrocities and horrors that still take place in the middle-East to this day. Although places are fictitious, one understands that Lebanon is the theatre of the tragedy, with Palestine and other neighbours implied. As a break with tradition, not the muslims but, in this case, the Christian nationalists, are doing the load-bearing duty of unleashing the worst atrocities. One of the most difficult scene is when a bus of muslim refugees is stopped by them and everybody is summarily executed. A mum and her daughter survive the shooting, as well as Nawal, the heroine, an Arab Christian (probably Maronite), who also survives the setting on fire meant to complete the slaughter, by showing her crucifix and claiming her Christianity. She takes the young girl with her under this last-minute safe-conduct, condemning the mother to the flames, for whom she can't nothing, but the girl runs back to the bus now set on fire, burning her mother alive among the other corpses. She gets shot as she runs.
This is not the first trauma of Nawal in this damned region of the cradles of religions. Her own lover—a Palestinian refugee—was shot in the head by her brother after she tried to escape with him, being pregnant. She gives birth to the child that is tattooed by her grandmother with three dots on the heel, as she is asked to abandon him and flee to the city to get "educated", as an alternative to be also murdered to wash her family honour. The child is sent to an orphanage. Nawal makes the promise to find him back later. She was looking for him when she was in the bus that got put on fire. After this incident, however, she decides to side with the muslims and kills the leader of the Christian militia, for which she is sent to be tortured at the Kfar Ryat prison. There, to maintain her dignity, she sings, and gets to be known as "la femme qui chante" (the woman who sings). This should have been the title of the movie.
Her son, Nihad de Mai, also looked for him mum all his life. He was taken first by the local Muslim warlord—Chamseddine—who turned him into a soldier, for which he turned out to have exceptional predispositions, being a sort of genius killer, indeed killing no less than seven Christian gunmen before being capture. Instead of executing him, however, they decide to use his talent for crimes by making him the torturer at their prison Kfar Ryat, under the new name of Abou Tareq. This is where he finally reunites with his mother. His task there is to remove the will of a particularly defiant prisoner to keep singing in the face of adversity. Unfortunately, however, neither him nor her have an inkling of an idea who the other one is. An enemy, an animal, this is what they both see. A criminal and a whore. This is the reunion of two people who have been looking for each others all their life, but not knowing that they have finally reunited:
One learns of this denouement only at the end of the movie. By chance, Nawal recognizes the three dots on the heel of someone at the swimming pool. When she gets out, in shock, she gets a deeper shock still to realize that this is no else than her rapist, who begot her two children, her twins, one being with her in the pool. Nihad does not recognize his victim, let alone his mother, and of course has no notion that his sister, who is also is daughter, is nearby. Nobody but Nawal knows or understand anything.
And this is where the movie acquires its Hugolian dimension. She writes two letters, one for the father of her children, which she gives to her son, and one for their brother, which she gives to her daughter, with the task to find them, to hand them the letters. They do not know, yet, that these two letters are addressed to the same person. The movie is about the twins looking for these two people and finally reckoning the horror of what has happened.
The letters, however, redeem everything.
One is vindictive and is addressed to the father. It is in French and use the "Vous", and condemns the atrocity and blame the criminal. It is signed "the whore from the cell 72". The other is addressed to the son, and use the "Tu", and is full of love and commiseration, and forgiveness. It is signed "the prisoner of the cell 72".
This is it. This is the movie: love and hatred hand in hand, together, the realization that those we hate are those we look for, those who have been looking for us, and that those we love can be hateful and despicable, and commit deeds which nobody can forgive. But we must, because we love them, because they are, maybe, even if we don't know, they are our son, abandoned, cursed, lost...
One cannot insist enough on the redemption, on the acceptation, on the forgiveness that this movie transcends. In her letter to the son, Nawal tells her «je t'ai trouvé beau» (I found you beautiful), «je te souffle toute la douceur du monde, mon amour» (I breathe all the sweetness of the world into you, my love), «prend soin de toi» (take care of yourself). She also tells him, «console toi» (Console yourself) and the pivotal line of the movie:
(en)
Tu es né de l'amour; ton frêre et ta soeur sont donc aussi nés de l'amour.
Such Christic ascension to universality frees even the most tormented, the most tormenting person, from all the afflictions. In her letter to her children, Nawal tells them how she has now broken the thread of hate. Thanks to them, she could do that. She is free. Her death was her beginning. Christic.
When I was a child, we read in school an abridged version of Quatre-Vingt Treize by Victor Hugo. That's how I grew up. In my time, we were given this type of material to read. I was so fascinated by the work that I got a complete version, unabridged. Incidentally, I found the concept of abridging outrageous and degrading, in particular because one scene not part of the sample particularly resonated and shaped me as a person.
On the Corvette Claymore—an English boat smuggling in the Marquis de Lantenac, a counter-revolutionary—three dramatic chapters unravel: first, the Tormentum belli, the aftermath of a cannon breaking loose in the tempest; then, in Vis et vir, a sailor courageously and heroically saves the ship. In a third chapter Les deux plateaux de la balance, the Marquis takes the highest distinction from the ship's commander, la croix de Saint-Louis, to pin it on the chest of the hero, whom he asks to then be shot on the spot, for his negligence that resulted in the accident in the first place.
This mixture of love an exaltation, together with its simultaneous display of cruelty and pitilessness, is one of the characteristic traits of Hugo. We find it not only in the rest of the novel (Cimourdain will likewise have Gauvain, whom he loves like a son, guillotined, for having spared Lantenac following a self-sacrifice to save children), but in much of this work.
This superposition of contrasts, this embrace of the marvelous with the horrible, this fusion of opposites, this acceptation of all that there is, this is something that has, ever since, captivated me. In Incendies, one finds one of its finest modern rendition.