Translating – from one medium to another, or one language to another – is always a well-intentioned act of arson.
For Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, transforming Wajdi Mouawad's powerful play Incendies into a movie meant that he had to torch much of what initially drew him to it.
“I kept the characters, I kept the dramatic structure, but all the beautiful words: I had to burn them,” says Villeneuve, leaning forward and speaking softly, as if confessing a crime.
“My dream was to get rid of all the words – to make a silent film – but it was too expensive. The only way to respect the play was to be totally far away from it.”
Villeneuve's willingness to wage a scorched-earth campaign against Mouawad's wrenching, poetic dialogue is ultimately what has lifted Incendies above so many films based on plays that retain a lingering whiff of the stage.
By substituting in equivalent poetic visuals shot by cinematographer André Turpin, Villeneuve's film, which opens this week in Toronto and Vancouver, has been winning acclaim from festival audiences around the world. Since the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Incendies has been sold to more than 30 countries, named the year's best Canadian film by the Toronto film critics and was selected as Canada's submission for the foreign-language film category at the Academy Awards.
On Thursday, Villeneuve – a Genie and Jutra winner whose previous films include Polytechnique and Maelström – will find out if Incendies has made a short list of nine for the Oscar. As Villeneuve tells it, the story behind the success of his film begins in 2004 when he went to see the original play, directed by Mouawad, at the 160-seat Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montreal's Plateau Mont-Royal.
It was, Villeneuve says, a “coup de foudre” – or love at first sight. “It was just totally astonished – it was like when I saw Apocalypse Now for the first time,” he says. “I had this strong intuition that I was in front of a masterpiece – and that the author was still alive and was my neighbour.”
After the performance, Villeneuve immediately brought the play's script to producer Luc Déry, who read it overnight and agreed to work on it.
It took longer to convince Mouawad. At the time, the Lebanese-born playwright and director had just finished ushering an earlier play of his – Littoral, or Tideline, in English – to the screen, a process of self-inflicted arson he had found sapping. He was skeptical that Incendies would make a good movie.
Villeneuve didn't give up, however – and after writing several scenes of a screenplay and showing them to Mouawad, he won the playwright over. But just as Villeneuve had needed distance from the play to make the movie, Mouawad wanted to keep his distance, too. “He said, ‘I trust you; I give you carte blanche,’ ” Villeneuve recalls. “‘I'm going to be your friend, but I'm going to be far away.’ ”
Villeneuve's film retains the same intriguing set-up as the play: After the death of their mother, Nawal, twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) receive two letters from her notary. The first is to be delivered to a father they thought was dead. The second is to be delivered to a brother they didn't know they had.
Jeanne and Simon head to the unnamed, war-torn Middle Eastern country of Nawal's origin on their individual quests – and, along the way, the harrowing details of their mother's pre-Canada existence are revealed to them (and shown to us).
Many reviewers have assumed the country in Incendies is Lebanon, which Mouawad's family fled for Paris and then Montreal at the start of the civil war. But the place names in the film are all imaginary, while the film was shot in Jordan.
