Before the rains

This powerful movie opened in New York recently to rave reviews. The movie is set in the tea plantations of Kerala in 1937. It sensitively handles issues of colonialism, the Indian Independence movement, master-servant relations and the conflicts that beset people that try to step out of their culture. Nandita Das and Rahul Bose were spectacular.

Fatal culture clash, imperialist entitlement, forbidden passion between master and servant: the ingredients of the Indian director Santosh Sivan’s period piece “Before the Rains” may be awfully familiar, but the film lends them the force of tragedy. From the moment Moores (Linus Roache), an arrogant British planter in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala, hands a gun to his loyal manservant T. K. (Rahul Bose), you can be certain that the weapon will be discharged and lives destroyed. “Before the Rains” is a dispassionate study of how power, when threatened, ruthlessly exercises its prerogatives. — Stephen Holden, The New York Times