Los Angeles Journal


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2008-05-08

by Ed Rampell

'Before the Rains'

Summary

Outcaste for good...film

Article

With its sumptuous cinematography, location shooting in India, anti-colonial politics and star crossed love story, Santosh Sivan’s Before the Rains is one of the best pictures released so far this year.

Before the Rains has many of the attributes of the cross-cultural genre I tongue- in-cheekily call “Life Among the ‘Savages’ Cinema,” wherein a Westerner from a more developed society lives in a “primitive” Third World nation, with resulting cultural complications. From Tarzan to Dances With Wolves, this has been a recurring, if overlooked, movie theme.

Set in India in 1937, ambitious British planter Peter Moores (Leopold Benedict) plans to make his fortune by building a private road in a spice region near his plantation. (Shades of toll roads!) While the “mouse” -- his wife Laura (Jennifer Ehle) – is away at England visiting her disapproving father – the “cat” (Peter) plays, seducing his Indian housekeeper Sajani (Nandita Das), who is likewise married.

As Moores’ sort of “House Negro,” the educated “Native” T.K. (Rahul Bose) tries to navigate the English and Indian worlds, with a foot in both. After the interracial lovers are glimpsed in flagrante delicto near a waterfall, T.K. becomes unwillingly and increasingly enmeshed in the doomed affair between Sajani and Moores. The romance leads to disaster for all involved as the best laid development plans of mice and men fall apart before the ensuing rainfall. Both Sajani and T.K. become outcastes, in this flawlessly acted ensemble piece.

When Laura returns with Peter’s son from the “Mother Country,” she appears to be more attractive and erotic than Sajani. As the housekeeper’s secretive relationship with Moores is never fully developed onscreen or explained, it appears that the “superior” – in terms of money and the power relationship – “sahib” has merely sexually used Sajani, particularly during the absence of his wife. Sajani, however, has believed Moores’ sweet lies about true love, and is astonished and heartbroken when she discovers she’s merely been an indigenous “plaything” for “massah” while the mistress of the household has been abroad. The plot could be filed under the “Oh! What a tangled web we weave, When we practice to deceive” dossier.

India’s independence movement, led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, forms the backdrop to this drama of forbidden love. The relationship between Moores and Sajani, and also between Moores and his manservant T.K., are metaphors for the colonial relationship between the United Kingdom and the subcontinent. As the poet laureate of British imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, wrote: “East is East, and West is West, and the twain shall never meet.”

Except for Laura, who displays integrity, the Brits come across as pith-helmeted Colonel Blimp types, opportunists who are only in it for the money (and illicit sex). But the Indians do not appear to be saints either, as they (or at least their onscreen incarnations) can be violent, practice domestic abuse, pursue superstitions, etc. They may seem to be hidebound by tradition, but it is precisely this Hindu heritage that serves to free them from the white interlopers. (Note to President Bush: If you want to see this movie, I’ll personally buy you and your Laura tickets.) Nevertheless, T.K.’s ultimate stance vis-à-vis the liberation movement provides the redemption in this tale of tawdry, dishonorable behavior. The titular rains symbolically suggest the unstoppable flow of India’s mass movement against British rule.

Director Santosh Sivan comes from a family of Indian filmmakers; American moviegoers may know him from Sivan’s 2004 Bride & Prejudice, a “Bollywood-ized” update of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. For Before the Rains, Sivan likewise adapted 2000’s Red Roofs, an Israeli short film about a romance between an Israeli farmer and a Bedouin housemaid. Sivan set it in a subcontinental milieu in order to explore its universal theme of cultural collision.

Iron Man may announce the kicking off of the summer blockbuster season, but Before the Rains is a thinking person's big screen epic -- as thoughtful as it is visual and visceral.

Don’t miss this highly recommended, well-acted, stylishly lensed picture.