Icendies is a masterpiece. Astonishing, shocking, beautiful... the list could go on for so long and anyway it would not manage to describe how good this Canadian film is.
The starting point is pretty good: two Quebecois twins get astonished when her mother's last will is revealed to them, they have to go to the Middle East (from where her mother fled to start a new life in Canada) and find their brother and father (of whose existence the knew absolutely nothing). Though (I'm not sure why) no real names are used for the locations (not even for the country), having a few notions of recent history is enough to guess that the country is Lebanon.
The search begins, and it will walk them through a painful path that will help them better understand their mother. A harsh path of discovery where they'll be confronted with all the attrocities that swept Lebanon in the last decades. I've watched (and read) many more films, documentaries, articles... about the war in the ex-Yugoslavia than about Lebanon (ok, yes, I'm an Eurocentric bastard), so I'd never thought that much about how many similarities can be drawn between both bloody conflicts. Christians killing Muslims, Muslims killing Christian, torturing, raping, training child soldiers that will turn snipers that will shoot other kids dead... that's war, in all its cruelty... forget about heroes, medals, humanitarian actions, high tech advances... war is senseless bloodshed, hatred that will last for decades, neighbours killing neighbours, vomit, attrocity... and this film clearly shows it.
If the above paragraph has not sparked your interest yet, I'll add that the final twist of the story is outstanding, superb, harsh, beautiful, unprecedented... and will fucking blow you away. You won't find many chances to invest 2 hours of your life in anything that great as this film
Killing in the name of God...
No comments:
Post a Comment