When Gael Garcia Bernal is in a movie,
you pretty much figure it's going to be about oppressed peoples
struggling against their oppressor. “Even the Rain” manages to
fit in two stories along those lines.
Bernal plays Sebastian, a film
director making a movie about Columbus, Columbus's enslavement of
Indian natives, and the Spanish priests who spoke out against the
Indians' treatment. Sebastian's producer, Costa (Luis Tosar) takes
them to Bolivia to film in an environment of low overhead and cheap
extras. Those impoverished extras, it turns out, are locked in a
battle with the Bolivian government over access to water. The
government has joined with a multinational corporation on a water
project, and the people are no longer allowed to pump water from the
ground, collect it from rivers, or even capture the rain that falls
on their own roofs. Sebastian and Costa try to stay out of the
politics and focus on getting their film completed. The more they
try to turn a blind eye to the natives' plight, however, the more
hypocritical that blindness feels in light of the movie they are
making.
Gael Garcia Bernal is always good, but
“Even the Rain” is stolen by two other actors: Luis Tosar as the
money-man who finds his conscience, and Juan Carlos Aduviri as
Daniel, the native leader of the water uprising. Both actors are
magnetic on the screen, and the tense friendship that grows between
them is touching, in a manly way.
“Even the Rain” is nothing
spectacular, but it's a good, little story about the irony of telling
a story about past oppression while becoming a part of present
oppression. If you are up for a small, serious, Spanish-language
movie with excellent performances, this is a good one.
3 stars out of 5
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