Before the Rains

In this typical posh period drama from Merchant Ivory, Kerala filmmaker Santosh Sivan (Asoko, the Terrorist) replaces James Ivory and directs in Ivory’s typical way: competent, intelligent, unadventurous. A married British colonialist (Linus Roache) in India in the late 1930s finds his perfect world eroding when his secret romance with a beautiful local (Nandita Das) threatens to be exposed. Worse, the upstart native populace seem to want independence! Before the Rains heats up in the middle, with gunshots and suicide, and then as the placid English ex-pat turns out, more and more, to be a Macbeth-like rat and cad. But the narrative tumbles at the self-conscious, obviously constructed rainy ending. | Malayam + English | 98 minutes | Kendall Square

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