‘House on Fire’: Dark and funny parody of a Catalan bourgeois family | Culture

The discreet charm of the Mediterranean home evokes a certain formal purity: the white walls, the taste for craftsmanship, the open spaces and the light lamps, such as the Milá or the Coderch. This is the idyllic setting for Burning house, the new film by Barcelona director Dani de la Orden, a fierce parody, as dark as it is funny, about a mother from the Catalan bourgeoisie who is at odds with…

The discreet charm of the Mediterranean home evokes a certain formal purity: the white of the walls, the taste for craftsmanship, open spaces and light lamps, such as the Milá or the Coderch. This is the idyllic setting of Burning house, the new film by Barcelona director Dani de la Orden, a fierce parody, as dark as it is funny, about a mother of the Catalan bourgeoisie faced with her mature life and her loved ones.

The sale of the house in Cadaqués is the trigger for a family entanglement written by Eduard Sola, who writes a script as profound as it is agile about the dysfunctionality of a family in which everything seemed to flow easily. The cast is headed by a magnificent Emma Vilarasau, in the skin of a woman whose deep loneliness and desperation will emerge among the comical and absurd situations played out by her family. De la Orden (Barcelona, ​​summer night, Crazy for her) It draws gold from its actors: from the hilarious ex-husband played by Alberto San Juan to the artist, spoiled and infatuated son played by Enric Auquer or the bossy, selfish and cynical daughter played by María Rodríguez Soto also wonderfully. They and their respective partners (Clara Segura, Macarena García, José Pérez-Ocaña) make up a double-edged picture: the perfect postcard of the Costa Brava transformed into hell.

The film shows its cards from the beginning, when a sinister secret hits the light comedy rhythm that surrounds the story. It is the first of many lies or half-truths that no one is free from. Without falling into excess gravity at any time, not even in its final catharsis, Burning house It’s playful in the best sense of the word, perhaps because family dramas always have some (terrible) playfulness in them.

As was the case with the recent Home, film by Alex Montoya inspired by the novel of the same name by Paco Roca, what brings the scattered family together is the sale—and farewell—of the clan’s summer home. But if nostalgia, the memory of the father and his garden, centered Home, here there is hardly any room for idealized memory. However, in both films there is a common engine, the brick, the prosaic heart of a culture that from the outside revolves around the after-dinner meal but also the hidden and less flattering power of property and deeds.

Beyond the class differences between the two, in Burning house The portrait of the Mediterranean (bourgeois) family is much more caustic: the paradise of childhood as the scene of the worst adult miseries. He does not spare the grotesque portrait of the Order, but he almost always paints it with measured intelligence.

Denying the famous quote of Anna Karenina —“All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”— here unhappiness is also most recognizable, because no one is free from being selfish and capricious, due to the inevitable anchoring in humor or the stubborn denial of reality. Burning house does not save anyone, starting with the mother figure herself. Although the family and emotional disaster of this accurate film finds in its unexpected happy ending a place of their own where everyone will get what they deserve.