Before the Rains.

"It must have sounded like a good idea to somebody, sometime, to hire an actual Indian filmmaker - Santosh Sivan, director of 1999's The Terrorist and the 2001 historical epic Asoka the Great - to make one of those English-people-in-hot-weather, Merchant Ivory-style costume potboilers set in India," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "What we get instead in Sivan's Before the Rains is a perfectly matched combo of Western exoticism at its most dull-witted and Bollywood filmmaking at its most superficial."

"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," notes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "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... Before the Rains has been to moved to colonial India in 1937. The transition from one culture to another is seamless."

Updated through 5/16.

"[T]he screenplay, by Cathy Rabin and Dan Verete, builds nicely," adds David Edelstein in New York, "and the cinematographer turned director, Santosh Sivan, likes to break up the verdant images with bits of encroaching nature: a frog, some bees, the flies on a cow's eye."

In the Los Angeles Times, Kavita Daswani profiles cinematographer turned director Sivan.

Update, 5/13: Gary Dretzka talks with Sivan for Movie City News.

Update, 5/14: "[I]f Sivan overdoes on both the beauty and the portentousness of his locale - a shot of a crushed nest here, birds squawking ominously there - his view of the struggle between colonialists and natives is refreshingly complex," writes Matt Prigge in the Philadelphia Weekly.

Updates, 5/16: "Before the Rains tells the kind of story that would feel right at home in a silent film, and I suppose I mean that as a compliment," writes Roger Ebert. "It's a melodrama about adultery, set against the backdrop of southern India in 1937. There's something a little creaky about the production, especially in its frequent use of large crowds of torch-bearing men, who can be summoned in an instant at any hour of day or night to blaze a trail, search for a missing woman, or gather in front of the house of a possibly guilty man."

"All the expected hallmarks are there: sumptuous production values and pretty (though inexpressive) photography, undercooked melodrama, and political metaphor so obvious that it doesn't merit being referred to as subtext," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Everything is right there on the surface."

Posted by dwhudson at May 10, 2008 10:13 AM