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| World Home » Entertainment » Cinema Addicts » | Sat. May 17, 2008 |
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After Them the Monsoon: Two Worlds Collide in India MIL/NYT, May 9, 2008. May 9, 2008 - Fatal culture clash, imperialist entitlement, forbidden passion between master and servant: the ingredients of the Indian director Santosh Sivan’s period piece “Before the Rains” may be awfully familiar, but the film lends them the force of tragedy. From the moment Moores (Linus Roache), an arrogant British planter in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala, hands a gun to his loyal manservant T. K. (Rahul Bose), you can be certain that the weapon will be discharged and lives destroyed. Moores has a grand scheme to build a road into the jungle, the better to transport spices for export, but it must be completed before the monsoon season. Some of the most visually striking scenes in the lavish, beautifully photographed film, which was made on location in Kerala, show a virtual army of laborers from the nearby village hacking down trees and digging the road. It isn’t quite slave labor, but almost. “Before the Rains” is adapted from “Red Roofs,” the longest of three unrelated stories in the Israeli director Dany Verete’s 2002 film, “Yellow Asphalt,” which explored the collision of modern customs and tribal traditions in contemporary Israel. In that movie a wealthy Jewish farmer who has an affair with his Bedouin housekeeper forces his assistant, a Bedouin tribesman, to initiate drastic damage control once the relationship is detected. With a screenplay by Cathy Rabin, “Before the Rains” has been to moved to colonial India in 1937. The transition from one culture to another is seamless. Moores, played by Mr. Roache with a cunning charm that masks an authoritarian severity, is carrying on a passionate affair with his housekeeper Sajani (Nandita Das), a beautiful, naïve woman who commutes from the village to work at his nearby ranch. One afternoon they are accidentally spied making love at a waterfall by two young boys from the village, who report seeing Sajani with an unidentified man. When her husband, Rajat (Lal Paul), interrogates her, Sajani’s evasive replies drive him into a fury and he savagely beats her, which under tribal law is within his rights. Since Moores’s wife, Laura (Jennifer Ehle), has recently arrived from England with their son Peter (Leopold Benedict), Sajani has already become someone to be kept hidden, although Moores still swears he loves her. More:
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