Friday 20 June 2008

EIFF: Before The Rains - Review by Guest Contributor Eva Hoffmann

Director:Santosh Sivan
Running Time:98min
Director and cinematographer Santosh Sivan's cinema is a visual one. Before the Rains bears no exception. It is the story of two very different men in a 1930s India. Henry Moores (Linus Roache) and TK Neelan (Rahul Bose). Whatever happens to anything or anyone around them will eventually happen to them. The broad strokes with which Sivan draws the story into the landscape, allow him time to dwell. Stripped to the very basic, every detail within the shot bears meaning and changes the same as it returns and returns. Every gesture, every event reoccurs. Without any haste catastrophe unfolds, will take its toll, only to be washed up by the monsoon rain. It is a stunningly beautiful film simultaneously lush and precise. Be it the clash of two cultures, betrayal among friends, greed, cowardice, disappointment, honesty, redemption or love; like a painting it tells the greatest and smallest stories on a single canvas.

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