Tribeca Review: Before the Rains
Directed by: Santosh Sivan
Written by: Cathy Rabin
Cast: Linus Roache, Rahul Bose, Nandita Das, Jennifer Ehle, John Standing
out of 5 stars
Among contemporary Indian cinema’s bright newcomers, Santosh Sivan (”The Terrorist”) directs the Raj-era tragedy of doomed romance, social scandal, nationalism, and one man’s personal disgrace with an eye towards David Lean’s lush, sensitively filmed “A Passage to India.” This is a Merchant-Ivory production, so we expect (and get) a mannered, tasteful exoticism throughout. While Cathy Rubin’s script is riddled with absurdly stilted and on-the-nose dialogue, her story still manages to intrigue, and Sivan gets strong performances from his entire cast.
The pastoral tranquility of T.K. (Rahul Bose) and Sajani’s (the ever-luminous Nandita Das) village is upset by the twin rumblings of anti-British nationalism, and the villagers’ antipathy towards an aspiring British spice planter, Moores (Linus Roche), who’s building a major roadway through these remote and fertile lands. Kept secret to all but Moores’s devoted assistant T.K. is the ongoing affair between Moores and the married Sajani, who’s employed as a servant girl at Moores’s plantation. This being a story guided by Indian sensibilities, scenes of eroticism are only hinted at, and this self-conscious obliqueness results in a dependence on overly expository dialogue, which Das tries to deliver with her casual lyricism. But when Moores’s wife and son arrive at the estate, and Sajani’s husband discovers the affair, the drama really starts to cook, as Sajani finds herself a hunted woman, caught between a doomed love and a ruthless tradition in which cuckolding women pay with their lives. Desperate to keep his spice business alive, Moores distances himself from Sajani, an act whose price includes Sajani’s life, the breakdown of his livelihood and marriage, and, worst of all, the incrimination of T.K. who’s discovered in possession of the weapon that killed Sajani. All these factors clash in the heat of village traditions, patriarchal fury, T.K.’s insistence on clearing his name while protecting his English employer’s, and Moores head-on course towards the worst kind of punishment — a man’s inability to live with himself. Beautifully played by Bollywood mainstay Bose and by Roche, with an effective portrayal of East-West tensions, “Before the Rains” is a worthy addition to the Merchant-Ivory catalog, and an impressive cross-cultural achievement for director-cinematographer Sivan.
