Two movies this week deal with the way the past can haunt the present, and both in the context of countries with a history of political violence: Retribution is set in South Africa and Incendies in Lebanon. Yet they take rather different approaches to their subject matter — and, for that matter, end up in rather different places.
Retribution is about a retired judge (Joe Mafela) who has gone off to his small holiday home somewhere in the desolate countryside to finish his memoirs. We see him being spurred on by his publisher; we also see the bottle of booze he keeps in the drawer of the desk where he is working.
A hiker (Jeremy Crutchley) who has apparently wandered off the right path turns up on the judge’s doorstep and the judge gives him a bed for the night — but of course the hiker isn’t so innocently lost, and he has a plan of his own.
If the title or the poster didn’t tell us that, it would be possible to see the shape of Retribution from its first 15 or 20 minutes. This is a plot with which we are likely to be familiar. In that respect, you could say this is not a particularly South African film; yes, it’s set in this country, and has two excellent South African actors at its heart, but it’s not exactly a case of “telling our own stories” in the straightforward way that South African filmmakers are told they are supposed to do.
The unimportance of place
Basically, the South Africanness of Retribution is detachable: you could redo the film for pretty much any other country and any nationality without much effort. The South Africanness here is not at the core of the story; instead, you could say, it’s the decor. One could easily see Retribution remade, with only small changes, and with, say, Robert Duvall in the role of the retired judge, and perhaps a Joseph Gordon-Levitt or a Ryan Gosling as the hiker. The central location could be a cabin in any one of a number of woods in the American outback.
That said (and the argument about how South African a South African film has to be could go on for a while), Retribution is a very well-made movie. The script is tight and the actors do their bit with consummate skill — it’s particularly gratifying to see Mafela, so long known as a jolly comic on our TV screens, taking a more serious role. It’s also good to see Crutchley getting his teeth into a juicy movie character; he’s been hanging in there as an actor for a long time, and has come a long way since he took off his clothes for Peter Toerien in Equus 20 years ago.
Shades of grey
The film is glossily and slickly shot, but it’s a slickness that’s like a layer of varnish over a crumbling, distressed surface. Visually, it finds the starkness in this denuded environment, emphasising the starkness of its storyline; its frames have been leached of colour, as though they had been left out in the harsh sunlight to fade almost to a monochrome.
At the same time, this is not a black-and-white story, or at least not in the racial terms to which we South Africans are accustomed. I thought, as I watched it, that we’d get some kind of denouement relating the film’s events to the apartheid era — that it’d be a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission movie. But, no, it’s a very post-apartheid movie. The judge may be black and the hiker may be white, but that racial polarity is irrelevant to what happens in the narrative.
In those terms, and as a psychological thriller of the internationalised kind, Retribution works perfectly. Perhaps it is to its advantage, as a narrative, that it bothers little with anything extraneous to its core drama, and it makes a tough, taut, riveting thriller that I think will entertain many.
Journey into fear
Incendies, by contrast, is a different beast — and not just because it’s further away from any genre specifications. It starts with the children of a dead mother hearing the terms of her will; they are twins (as a big red screen title informs us), one male and one female, and their mother is asking them, from beyond the grave, to go on a rather scary quest. They are to find a father and a brother they didn’t know they had, and they are to search in the place their mother came from, which is Lebanon, although we are never told that.
Do the maths and it’s clear they were born at a time when Lebanon was being torn apart by civil war, when Christians and Muslims were engaged in vicious attacks and reprisals on one another.
Through a series of flashbacks sewn expertly into the fabric of the film, we the viewers, along with Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and later Simon (Maxim Gaudette), discover what happened to their mother Nawal (Lubna Azabal) during that time of horror.
This step-by-step process of discovery is deeply absorbing, and Incendies ultimately delivers an emotional punch of almost sickening force. The title means something like “fires” or “conflagrations”, and you could see the movie as a series of explosions, literal and psychological, from the reading of Nawal’s last wishes to the ending’s final revelations.
I’m in two minds, though, about the way the film becomes something like an ancient Greek tragedy, in which the characters begin to seem like the playthings of particularly cruel gods. Does that take the viewer out of the harsh realism of the story, and away from the real events that underpin it, and into a realm of overwrought symbol? I’m not sure, and different viewers will probably have differing reactions on that level.
Whatever the case, though, it’s certain that Incendies is an extraordinarily powerful piece of work. It’s a burning film, and you emerge from it feeling more than a little scorched.