Entertainment

Contrived Mideast tale can’t faith the truth

Two grieving twins, a brother and a sister, learn only in their mother’s will that their father is still alive — and that they also have a brother. In accordance with their mother’s last wishes, each of these adult children is given a letter — one for the father, one for the brother — and told to go find the two men.

Canada’s “Incendies,” which this year was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, is a finely wrought work of care and suspense that is nonetheless ridiculous in terms of both plotting and theme. Not until the final moments of the film does it all fall into place, but I won’t drop any annoying hints about that.

The twins, Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) are French-speaking Canadians whose mother lapsed into silence and death after apparently suffering some kind of attack at a swimming pool.

In flashbacks, we learn about the journey of the mother, Nawal (Lubna Azabal), a Christian Arab growing up in a Middle Eastern village. When her boyfriend is gunned down before her eyes by her own brother in an honor killing, she is left pregnant. She is forced to give up that child, a son, for adoption. Then she spends the rest of the film trying to get him back, slipping back and forth between her Muslim and Christian allegiances to do so. Her only loyalty is to her son, not ideology.

Most of the movie takes place in an unnamed, fictional Mideast country rent by a civil war between Christians and Muslims. There is good reason for the choice of an imaginary land, which makes it easy to ignore the ugly facts of history.

The fine points and even the broad outlines of the region’s politics don’t interest either the writer (Wajdi Mouawad, whose play is this film’s source) or the director (Denis Villeneuve), each of whom is enraptured by a child’s or spaceman’s view of things. Bad things happen; people are mean to each other. There’s plenty of hate on all sides. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?

No, let’s not.

A kind name for this attitude is false moral equivalence, or perhaps post-imperial cringe. A less kind one is Western self-hatred, or an urgent plea to tolerate the intolerant.

Treating us to scenes in which, for instance, a band of Christian terrorists fires upon and then burns a school bus full of innocent Muslim civilians, “Incendies” isn’t incendiary so much as tired. Virtually every effort in the last decade’s movies on the topic either portrays Islamic terrorism with a degree of sympathy or makes it look as though Christians and/or Jews are as responsible for the bloodshed as Muslims.

Even before the preposterously contrived conclusion of “Incendies” boldfaces the message, we’re given to believe that there are no sides. That we’re all baked together in a warm sticky casserole of humanity. If this were true, then why is it that a Bible burnt in Afghanistan never seems to unleash deadly riots in Florida?

kyle.smith@nypost.com