Santosh Sivan: Before the Rains (2007)

[Chris Knipp]

Santosh Sivan: Before the Rains (2007)

Trouble in the family. Pretty scenery outdoors.

Review by Chris Knipp

Somerset Maugham was a master of colonial adultery. His short stories are full of it, men and women in this or that corner of the British Empire getting themselves into devastating marital fixes. In Before the Rains, the Indian cinematographer and director Santosh Sivan muddles his tropical tragedy of adultery as Maugham would never have done.

Henry Moores (Linus Roache) is a planter in the Kerala province of India where a fresh revolt against the British Raj is just brewing. It's 1937. He is having an affair with his beautiful native housekeeper while his wife and young son are away on an extended stay in England. On an idyll gathering honey in a sacred grove Moores and his housekeeper are spotted by two little boys while making love (though, lucky for him, they don't recognize Moores). Shortly thereafter Moores' wife and son return to India and trouble ensues that disturbs the house and the planter's ambitious project to build a freight road up over the hills. He was meaning to expand from tea into spices--generously promising to share the resulting profits with his local assistant, T.K. (Rahul Bose). T.K. is a childhood friend of Sajani, the housekeeper (Nandita Das) and lives on the premises, having in his possession a pistol Moores has just given him as a reward for his help and loyalty. Three guesses what that's going to lead to.

In Maugham's stories the equations are simple and relentless. So are they here, but the power and focus of the story are undermined by the way not just one but all three of the main characters try to dodge the inevitable while the lovely lens of Sivan dwells overlong on the scenery indoors and out. Sajani is understandably unable to accept that she's dispensable. Moores, who is either spineless or a fantasist, tries to pretend nothing is amiss. T.K., who has one foot uneasily planted in each of two opposing worlds, thinks he can protect his Sahib and still not become an outcast in the village. But the village is a place to whose laws T.K. remains subject and in which Sajani still lives with an angry husband. The latter is already suspicious of her even before the boys tell their story and is permitted by the local code to beat her, just because he cares.

Maugham would have brought things to their highest pitch in the awful moments when Moores's wife Laura (the usually excellent Jennifer Ehle, rather wasted here) looks for cheer or affection or even just ease from her husband and he cannot oblige. But Sivan hasn't enough time to draw the full value from that. He's busy with too many other things--the trap Sajani gets into; T.K.'s dilemma; the impending revolt; delays that may keep the road project from its necessary completion before the monsoon. There's much about the village system of justice, including a novel test of a defendant's truthfulness. There's even the repeated worry that Moores will lose the loan he took out for the road project. Maugham would wisely have paid a lot less attention to anything peripheral to the psychological and moral drama. The trouble is that Sivan's a bit like T.K.: he wants to work on both sides of the stream, shine his light on the colonials with their linens and khaki and bathtubs (and, like in Ang Lee's overwrought Lust Caution, on their shiny period motor cars)--and also look into the village culture and the bonds of Indian family life. Besides which, he can't stop training his lens on the pretty surroundings, even at a point when they're certainly not a concern of the principals and shouldn't be ours.

Everybody plays their role, nothing more: psychological subtlety is lacking. Sajani is beautiful and passionate and disappointed. Moores pleases everyone and no one. T.K. is sweaty and loyal. Moores' wife is confused, her final realization of everything coming in an instant with buggy eyes--no time for the slow burn. Though T.K. is pivotal, he isn't really interesting. We don't get to look into his mental confusion. This is no Passage to India, and subtle insights into racism and the breakdown of communication between cultures aren't forthcoming. As so easily happens when too many balls are being juggled, the pacing suffers and events just gradually lumber along. There's not much danger of giving away the ending because it's a muddle.

The choice of a specific point of view would have sharpened and intensified everything. In the absence of that, the main characters lack complexity. Moores as played by Roache is almost a blank, hard to care about one way or the other. If only he were either a true romantic, or an obvious cad, but no such luck. If only T.K. had doubts, or were more foolish or overeager. Of course we care about poor Sajani, but this is most clearly not from her point of view: once she's in trouble, she is mostly off-screen. Ironically Moores' young son Peter (Leopold Benedict), though he hasn't many lines, seems as interesting as the others because he at least has an arresting face.

We thought Merchant Ivory was a dead operation since Merchant himself literally passed away in 2005, but this is attributed to Merchant Ivory. It has the Merchant Ivory gloss but not the Merchant Ivory glow; in fact Ivory had nothing to do with the production. The director's earlier The Terrorist was a vividly claustrophobic little story; interestingly, it was entirely and intensely from the protagonist's point of view, the thing that is so lacking here. Sivan has drifted, unfortunately, into a more conventional, diffuse mode.