Roadside Attractions / Alphonse Roy
Linus Roache and Nandita Das in "Before The Rains."
It must have sounded like a good idea to somebody, sometime, to hire an actual Indian filmmaker -- Santosh Sivan, director of 1999's "The Terrorist" and the 2001 historical epic "Asoka the Great" -- to make one of those English-people-in-hot-weather, Merchant Ivory-style costume potboilers set in India. What we get instead in Sivan's "Before the Rains" is a perfectly matched combo of Western exoticism at its most dull-witted and Bollywood filmmaking at its most superficial. The story sounds great, on paper: It's got interracial romance and betrayal, political and ethnic violence, and a faint feminist undercurrent. But the resulting movie is so pretty and so utterly lifeless you can almost smell the embalming fluid coming off the screen.
"Before the Rains" actually is a Merchant Ivory production, but I don't know what the hell that means, given that Ismail Merchant died in 2005 and James Ivory had nothing to do with making this movie. What I can tell you is that the genuine articles, meaning such quasi-imperialist Merchant Ivory classics as "Shakespeare-Wallah," "Bombay Talkie" and "Heat and Dust," look like the collected works of Welles and Renoir compared to the confectionery boredom of "Before the Rains." (I'll come out of the closet right now and admit to liking quite a few of the Merchant-Ivory-Ruth Prawer Jhabvala collaborations, and if that gets me kicked out of the film-snob cult as a middlebrow, so be it.)