Before the Rains
of love, passion & other things which destroy us
Here's a simple movie simply told on the one thing which can never be simple
-an affair. Add the Raj to the background, the male-at-large to be an Englishman
(married, as always, to an honourable woman) and the woman-in-love to be his
local maid (married to a cad), and you can only have red spreading all
over the sylvan greens of Kerala.
The time is just before the rumblings of the freedom movement had started.
Henry Moore (Linus Roache), a genial Englishman, owns a plantation. He has
Neelan (Rahul Bose) as his general local man Friday. Together they dream of
growing spices instead of tea in the faraway hills, and of transporting them
by building a road. Neelan loves the equality given by Henry (they have
evening drinks together, and Henry promises to name the road after him). So
much so, he refuses to become part of the growing swell of the freedom
movement.
But then, the sahib's wife is not there, and the maid, Sajani (Nandita
Das), is dark and sensual. The inevitable happens. But one day, deep in
the forests, the couple is seen whilst making love; the maid is recognized,
though Henry is not. The deceptively peaceful co-existence suddenly becomes a
cauldron of revenge, retribution and realization. And the road, symbolically a linkage,
suddenly has no destination. And everybody's lives are thrown asunder.
Santosh Sivan captures turmoil and turbidity with a dispassionate beauty.
His camera caresses the perfect lushness of hills and the rush of waters with
an artist's sensibilities. And it contrasts poignantly with the human
imperfections all around.
The story asks fundamental questions of love and survival - how far will you
go for love? How much can you sacrifice for an affair? Does love itself exist
without sacrifice and pain? And principally, when your self-interest and
comfortable status quo get disturbed, can and should love fall by the way-
side?
It’s easy to fault an affair as being intrinsically wrong; and the man who
delinks himself from the affair, when the chips are down, as self-centered.
But what Sivan has done with dexterity is to give grey where there is love,
and made self-preservation as being another side of being human. And he
gently leads his viewers to the ache of heart-break.
Maggots home onto the eye of a cow as the lovers stealth away for their
rendezvous. Brambles appear on the road when Henry gives a gun to Neelan. A
grasshopper is a freed soul. The lines of the lovers' hands rub against each
other, but soon have streaks of blood covering them. And when Sajani asks the
river waters to wash her sins away, a small white flower dislodges from her
leg and floats away. There is much that the visuals portend and foretell.
Linus Roache’s is hapless in his love, lust and self-preservation. Rahul Bose
sees his idol collapse under the weight of events and his own expectations.
And Nandita Das bears the brunt of her character's tragedy with heart-
breaking accuracy.
However much joy illicit affairs afford, they are intrinsically tragedies.
For they either break - or worse, they get consummated - and then
disillusionment is not far away. Either way, an impossible dream remains that.
Sivan's is a gentle soul, whose craft leads us into the brief joys and
tragedies of being human, and finding that perfidy is merely the other side
of passion.
On Prime Video in India
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