Philadelphia Weekly

Sari-crossed lovers: Linus Roache plays an Englishman

A gun introduced in chapter one, said Anton Chekhov, must go off before chapter three. The playwright should've also said something about starry-eyed lovers, as whenever a pair are introduced staring into each other's eyes to profess undying amour, it usually means one of them is going to die. (Or be hit by a car. Or be whisked away by a studlier specimen.) As luck would have it, Before the Rains, Santosh Sivan's India-set period melodrama, affords you a chance to see both examples.

Minutes after the opening credits, plucky British colonialist Linus Roache (Priest, currently Law & Order) hands a pistol to his trusted right-hand man Rahul Bose. Shortly thereafter Roache makes sweet, sweet, tastefully shot love with Nandita Das, his married housemaid and mistress (and Bose's sister), in a waterfall. Oh snap!

When not gawking at the pretty scenery--the film was shot in and around the jungles of Kerala, which Sivan gives you scores of time to notice is quite a bit retina-searing--it's impossible not to spend the first half of the film in mounting dread, wondering just how the Chekhovian model will arrange to have these two portentous forces coincide into one super-tragedy.

Produced by Merchant Ivory--still a trademark name apparently, despite the 2005 death of Ismail Merchant--Before the Rains works a similar vein as the pair's Indian-set films. As with Shakespeare Wallah, Bombay Talkie and others, Sivan's film is just as awestruck over the environs as it is keenly alert to the prickly relationship between East and visiting (or in this case, occupying) West.

Set in 1937 as native Indian resentment over British rule was first coming to a head, Rains finds Roache as possibly the only enlightened Englishman in an empire of cartoonishly oblivious imperialists. Bewitched by his new home and down with the locals, he has a big industrial plan to build a transport road through the scenic jungle, which would help bring supplies to those in more far-off spots and generally make life easier. But the whimsies of fate--or just those of screenwriter Cathy Rabin--conspire to ruin Roache's plans, first with the unexpected return of his clueless wife (Jennifer Ehle) and then the growing suspicions of Das' older, wife-beating husband.

It's too cruel to spoil the garish twist of fate that befalls Roache and Das, but suffice to say it's heavy enough to single-handedly turn Rains from a familiar and wearisome colonialist romp to a nail-biter with a genuine ethical dilemma.

Without revealing too much, the second half finds the livelihood of one character suddenly and unnervingly in the hands of Bose, who spends the first half waiting patiently in the wings to serve a meatier dramatic function. It's never 100 percent clear what he'll do with his newfound power/burden, and this uncertainty--which lasts until even just a few minutes before the grand finale--supplies Rains a charge that's doubly effective given that the first half feels like the aesthetic brethren to the handsome but thoroughly inert films of Deepa Mehta (Water).

Sivan is a longtime cinematographer, and he uses his camera to endlessly moon over the surroundings in a manner that suggests a travelogue maker's gaze rather than that of someone who was born there, as was Sivan. (It makes The Darjeeling Limited, which managed to refrain from and at times subvert the typical view of India as a place of almost alien beauty, look suddenly sharper than it initially seemed.)

But if 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.

Most of Rains' Britishers might as well be twirling their handlebar mustaches, but Roache, while vastly preferable in comparison, turns out to be far from a saint, and nerveless besides. Meanwhile the Kerala residents aren't salt-of-the-earth types, and though Rains may build to an up-with-India climax, it's wise enough to recognize the dark side of mass rebellion. Too bad you have to cut through a fairly thick jungle to get to the good stuff.