My House Is On Fire

Fearing I'd missed the point of this cryptic little film by Ariel Dorfman and his son Rodrigo, I sauntered into the stacks to look at Ariel Dorfman's play upon which the film is based (there's also a short story based on the play). Turns out, it is the filmmakers who seem to have missed, or at least, dulled, the point. My House is On Fire takes place in the spare, darkened living room of an old clapboard house. Two children, a boy and his young sister, are playing a kind of hiding game--hiding from an unspecified enemy. The boy is worried, cautious, serious; his sister more excited by the prospect of an encounter with the stranger; we hear cryptic talk of a mother who has gone away, of keeping secrets. A couple of ominous strangers finally do show up. They banter sarcastically with the kids, and apprehend the father upstairs. The nature of the strangers, the unspoken secrets, the fate of the children and their family are left for the viewer to surmise. Ariel Dorfman wrote his play/story in exile after the 1973 government coup in Chile. However, nothing in the film itself suggests its geo-political location, and there simply isn't enough narrative or dramatic power here to make this parable about political terror seen through the eyes of children work. Viewers are left with little more than artful cinematography and a hovering sense of dread and mystery--which are not enough. A marginal buy for larger academic and public libraries. Aud: H, C, P. (G. Handman)