CREATIVE QUOTIENT
Set in the 1930s in southern India against the backdrop of a growing nationalist movement, Before the Rains is the English language début of Santosh Sivan.

TK, an idealistic young man, finds himself torn between his ambitions for the future and his loyalty to the past when people in his village learn of an affair between his British boss and a village woman. Moores is carrying on a passionate affair with his housekeeper Sajani, 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 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’ wife, Laura, has recently returned from England with their son Peter, Sajani has already become someone to be kept hidden, although Moores still swears he loves her. But when Sajani shows up battered at his door in the middle of the night, he insists she leave as soon as possible. He gives her money and entrusts her to T K, who is ordered to make sure that she leaves. Before departing, she asks Moores one last time if he loves her, and after a pause, he coldly answers “No”.

Before The Rains does not dawdle in sentimentality. As much as you sympathise with Sajani’s hopeless plight, she is a pariah with nowhere to go. The film is a dispassionate study of how power, when threatened, ruthlessly exercises its prerogatives. The film’s most compelling figure is the unfailingly loyal T K. A stoic, taciturn man who loves his boss too much, he is a lost soul who has foolishly imagined he could keep one foot in the tribal world and the other in the modern. But for all his ability at navigating between the two, T. K. is as naïve in his way as Sajani.

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE
The film is adapted from Red Roofs, the longest of three unrelated stories in the Israeli director Dany Veretes 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 set in colonial India in 1937. The transition from one culture to another is seamless.

Nandita Das turns in a compelling performance. Linus Roache is completely in keeping with his character. Rahul Bose has worked hard on his role, but sometimes his finesse slips.

Santosh Sivan’s stunning cinematography does justice to the lush and picture-perfect landscape. In fact, it is that which raises the bar, hence the slow pace of the film and other lapses are pardoned as the camera caresses the landscape.