Since he debuted with the diptych Barcelona, summer night and Barcelona, winter nightthe Catalan director Dani of the Order He has been building a very eclectic career in which there has been room for big box office hits, such as The best summer of my lifewith Leo Harlemor for more personal films, such as Litusbased on the play by Marta Buchaca.
Now, he returns with what could be his best film, Burning houseand he does it accompanied by the screenwriter with whom he started in the industry, Eduard Sola. In it, the story is told of a wealthy family who will spend a weekend in the house of Cadaqués that the matriarch intends to sell.
She is Montse (the great Emma Vilarasau) and has managed to reunite his two children (Maria Rodriguez Soto and Enric Auquer), who will be accompanied by their respective partners (Macarena Garcia). They will be joined by her ex-husband (Alberto San Juan) and his current girlfriend (Clara Segura).
“I wanted to make a film about a family that loves each other badly,” Dani de la Orden tells Infobae Spain. “A family that, apparently, does not have any problems, at least financially, but that has lost its ability to communicate and relate to each other”.
Indeed, in some way, all the characters in Burning house they find each other frustratedwhether in the professional or personal sphere. The matriarch has dedicated her entire life to her children and now feels alone, the daughter has self-convinced which is a bad mother, the son, who has no musical talent, insists on being a singer-songwriter. And so on.
“Unless you make an Ikea ad where everyone is beautiful and perfect, I don’t think so usually in the purity of families”.
The sale of the beach house will be the trigger for conflicts to break out. “Films about inheritances are almost a genre in themselves, but what I wanted to talk about was the disconnection and the love from the toxic. That is why there is the spoiled and narcissistic child who all the time needs the confirmation of others to feel loved, or the father’s apathy, also love from the rage that provokes wear of a mother of a family that feels tired and invisible.”
Dani de la Orden has always liked films about family conflicts that take place in a just spaceas is the case of the adaptation of the play Augusteither Little lies without importancewhich changes the family for a group of friends.
Here, the main skill, in addition to choreograph scenes in corals in which a good handful of actors intervene at the same time, would be the way in which they are created funny situations from the miseries of the characters. “In reality, the film was presented as a dramabecause I think that comedy works better from drama, it seems closer to me and, in this case, it was not about making ‘gags’, but the humor comes from somewhere else. In this way, the jokeseven if they are very small and subtlestand out more within that very naturalistic tone.”
Within this magma of situations, the following stand out: female characters that, in some way, they rebel against that role of caregiver that patriarchal society has assigned to them and that, unfortunately, is still rooted in the collective subconscious.
“In the end, these are gender roles where women are the bad guys because they are the ones who manage the logistics, who are in charge of keeping order, and it must be exhausting. That is why, in the film, the women are tired, while the men are more apathetic, because that is the role that is supposed to be allowed for them.”
The director quotes the film Mrs. Doubtfire To illustrate this point: In it, Robin Williams was the fun, funny father who let the kids do whatever they wanted. And in the custody trial, the mother told him that she was tired of being the one who had to bring some order to that chaos and, therefore, being the bad guy. And it’s a beautiful moment, because then you understand the thesis of the film, and look, it was the nineties.
Much of the film is spoken in Catalan. In fact, its original title is House in flames. “Me alternate two languages different it seems to me wealth and cinema is a fantastic element to normalize all this. “It bores me when in movies all the accents seem to come from the same neighborhood.”
