Incendiary
Incendiary
DIR/WRI: Sharon Maguire • PRO: Adrienne Maguire, Andy Paterson, Anand Tucker • DOP: Ben Davis • ED: Valerio Bonelli • DES: Kave Quinn • CAST: Michelle Williams, Ewan McGregor, Matthew Macfadyen, Sidney Johnston
Art in the imitation of life has fascinated man since the first cave dweller illustrated life-sustaining animals on walls. This fascination with understanding and depicting our moments on earth has become the drive behind art and film historical studies – disciplines effective in carrying important subtexts about humanity’s past and present. Critical dissection of these subtexts is crucial to understanding the reflexive nature of artistic vision. We live in a time of terror and film is likewise conscious of this fact. Representations of grief, war, and struggle take on new meaning under the dictates of current world events. What messages are these films sending to the viewers asking for thrills and entertainment? Some films are perhaps more sinister in their coding than we would like to believe while others make no effort to hide their intentions. Incendiary is a film without shadows, yet its darkness and its seemly implausible and morally conflicted plot reflect an excruciatingly personal element of our current human struggle.
The film Incendiary is an adaptation of the novel by Chris Cleave in which a self-proclaimed ‘slapper’ living in East London loses her husband and son in a terrorist attack. Played brilliantly by Michelle Williams, mother of Heath Ledger’s young daughter, she descends into a world of grief. Ironically, the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival the day Heath was found dead in his New York City apartment. Intriguing as this is, the coincidental tragedy doesn’t end there. Chris Cleaves’ novel of the same name was released the same day as the 7/7 attacks on London’s transport system. Advertisements for the book were plastered on tube station walls as the bombs exploded.
Fascinating as these facts are, the film does not necessarily indulge morbid curiosity, but rather takes the viewer down a dark alleyway of momentarily relevant historical fiction seen all too often in Hollywood since the terror attacks of 11th September 2001. British cinema, however, has offered little informative contrast to the various and plentiful dramatisations of the 9/11 attacks, representations spurred on no doubt by rising political paranoia and America’s new terror-obsessed media. Obviously a comparison of post-9/11 cinema with the London-based Incendiary is problematic, but not without relevance. 9/11 had an eerily cinematic quality that simply cannot be reconciled to any other event in human history and, therefore, seems an easy choice for filmic re-presentation; however, Incendiary, produced by Film 4, is a valid addition to the post-9/11, post-7/7 film genre.
The voice of Michelle Williams, whose character remains nameless through out the film, floats over the opening sequence as she narrates a letter written in her grief to Osama bin Laden. ‘Dear Osama’ becomes a familiar phrase through out, but these letters are not what might be expected. It is not angry thoughts she shares but personal and honest emoting, bordering on philosophical questioning. These narrations lend a quiet poetry to her raging grief. Unfortunately, problematic motifs such as the ‘cemetery in the sky’ memorial disrupt viewer belief, while at the same time, missing persons posters alongside flowers for the dead and banners sentimentalising the tragedy harken back to real public reactions to past calamities.
As disarming as films about terrorism are, what might be even more disturbing about Incendiary is its attempt at a somewhat happy ending. The word ‘incendiary’ is explained and then re-referenced as a nod to the incendiary bombings which all but destroyed London during World War II, a tragedy which ultimately allowed for a once ancient and chaotic city plan to be rebuilt in an ordered and modern fashion. The young mother narrates this fact as if to prove a point illustrated by the films conclusion: tragedy allows her to throw off her burden of an unhappy marriage and rebuild a new. In and of itself this point seems fair enough, but somehow the mixture of suffering for her lost child and guilt for her past misbehaviour contradict the convenience of this happy ending.
What Incendiary does accomplish with gusto is a glimpse into the racist, reactionary and powerlessly terror-scarred western world. Incendiary represents an evolution in post-terror cinema, focusing more on the aftermath of the event rather than capitalizing on the action/drama potential of the incident. The personification of grief via Michelle Williams’ performance rockets a difficult story to a new plateau of compassion and becomes a spectacle to behold.
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