Friday, February 18, 2011

According to Iciar Bollain’s newest film Even The Rain we are a petty, selfish society prone to acts of greed. Also, this petty, selfish, terrible behavior isn’t a newly discovered way of living, it’s been happening for decades. Even worse, all of us, every single free-thinking individual on the planet knows this and is actively or inactively a part of it each and every day of our lives. To think that Iciar Bollain would even need to make another film that addresses this point seems redundant, but Bollain is a director of exceptional skill and manages to weave together hundreds of years of oppression and revolution in to a story both epic and extremely personal.

Review - Even The Rain

Even The Rain revolves around the making of a Spanish film about Christopher Columbus and the priests who fought his special brand of colonialism. Looking for cheap locations and cheaper extras, director Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his borderline unscrupulous producer Costa (Luis Tosar) have chosen Bolivia as the site of their picture. Unfortunately, the town is on the brink of revolution over the water rights owned by major corporations and their lead Daniel (the stunningly unique Juan Carlos Aduviri) is at the forefront of the rabble-rousing. Jumping back and forth between the film Sebastian is filming and the actual revolution occuring, Iciar is able to draw the parallels of the forefathers of colonialism with the acrid stench of modern societies equivalent errors. Its a beautiful decision as she never announces a change between filming and not filming, thus the two worlds and their awful similarities bleed in to one another, creating a portrait of how deeply integrated oppression has become.

Iciar uses a broad swath of characters to paint in the various shades of how the world interacts with Sebastian is the deluded liberal, able to rationalize his need for poorly paid extras with the greater need to finish his film at rock-bottom prices. Costa, his producer, needs no rationalization - doing things cheaply is how he gets a film made, regardless of the consequences of those he steps on to get there. Daniel, the revolutionary, is the films honest core, so hell-bent on making change he has, now and always, become out of step with society. Each character adds an increment of understanding, a further shade of how we as people react in such loaded situations.

I wish Iciar had been able to leave her film as sort of Malick-esque visual wandering. A series of loosely integrated scenes drawing upon ideas without forcing a conclusion. In the end though, Iciar uses the violent uprising of the Bolivian indians as a way for a single good deed to flip the tables on what we thought her character’s roles might have been. Though I wished for more vagueness, perhaps Iciar is saying that in a society built upon years of corruption and oppression, a single good act in an entire film might be the best we can hope for.

- Noah Sanders -



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