Fires Within

The kind of movie that television stations slot into their midday programming, Fires Within is a soap-like melodrama about a woman’s choice between loyalty and passion, set against a broadly-painted backdrop of the anti-Castro Cuban community exiled in Miami.

The story, written by Cynthia Cidre, and presumably based on personal experience, concerns the relationship between Isobel (Greta Scacchi), Nestor, a Cuban political prisoner who has just joined her and their daughter in Miami after eight years of imprisonment, and Sam (Vincent D’Onofrio, smouldering like a wannabe Brando to little effect), the fisherman who rescued her from a raft after she fled Cuba with said daughter after Nestor was arrested.

As the title indicates, the politics play second fiddle to the steamy emotions (Nestor is also hot for "Koo-ba" and has his own choice to make there). Cue the predictable cutting between Scacchi and her two lovers (at different times) rolling in the hay. With due respect to Armstrong, apparently the film was taken out of her hands in post-production and she was not happy with the result, but it is difficult to see how the film could have been much better. The direction is direly conventional, the narrative is freighted with unnecessary flashbacks in place of the immediacy of real drama, the production values are televisual and, like the whole shebang, lacking in authenticity with Scacchi and Smits sorely miscast as “Koo-bans” . At best, Fires Within is a time-filler between daytime domestic chores.

 

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