Even the Rain
Directed by: Icíar Bollaín
With: Gael García Bernal, Luis Tosar and Karra Elejalde
2010
Even the Rain seems to be a cynical-by-mistake reflection on South America ’s past and present.
Sebastián (Gael García Bernal) is a young director finally shooting the movie he dreamt about for years: an account of the colonization of the Americas Cochabamba , Bolivia
It must be acknowledged that at the base of the film there is a clever idea: next to the fiction of a movie set recreating the violations committed six hundred years ago there is the backdrop of the violations committed today, on the same people, under a different guise. The subtext of the film seems then to be ‘nothing has changed’. A great scene on this regard is that of the crew’s meeting with the city’s officials: while Sebastián is complimented for revisiting the important figures of Bartolomé de Las Casas and Antonio de Montesinons, the conversation is accompanied by the ‘white noise’ of police charging protesters in the street.
But the point that the two situations are eerily similar is not explicitly made. Or at least the characters seem not to fully realise. We hear Costa boasting over the phone of how little he is paying the local actors and we see Sebastián agreeing to bribe a policeman to get Daniel released from prison – who in the meantime had been arrested – for only one day in order to finish the movie. At the very beginning the idea of making a documentary on the water issue crossed the mind of María (Cassandra Ciangherotti) – an aspiring documentary maker on the set – but she very quickly seems to loose all interest as soon as Costa refused to back her up. When the riot becomes too menacing she prefers to catch the first plane for the Old World .
How could Sebastián, a director who weeps on a script page narrating the violence committed hundreds of years ago, not be gripped by the assaults taking place just out of his window, on the very people whose story he is narrating? If this characters’ blindness is intentional, Even the Rain carries a rather sad message. It seems to tell us that atrocities become apparent (and interesting?) only with the benefit of time, that we are blind to the present.
What I brought home with me was a moving choir of characters: the angry, moralistic sermons of Antonio de Montesinons and Bartolmé de Las Casas merged with the disillusioned, but lucid comments of Antón (Karra Elejalde), one of the crew’s actors and probably the most fascinating character in the movie.
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