Even the Rain (Friday, June 19, 2011) (46)

Iciar Bollain's Even the Rain tells the story of a Spanish film crew who show up in Cochabamba, Bolivia to shoot a movie about Christopher Columbus and Bartolome de las Casas. The crew is filled with liberal actors and artists, including director Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal), who all agree that the natives were treated badly by the Spanish explorers, but they are a bit less aware of the sociopolitical situation they find themselves in contemporary Bolivia.

It seems at the exact time of the shooting of this movie, Bolivians are getting upset at the government's agreement to sell water rights to private overseas companies. One of the leaders of the "free water for all" movement is Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri), who has been cast as the Indian chief in the film. On top of this, the reason the film is shooting in Bolivia, and not, say, the Carribean where Columbus actually landed, is because they can get very cheap labor there. They're exploiting the people of contemporary Bolivia the same way the Spanish exploited the Indians in the 15th and 16th Centuries.

This all sounds like a very straightforward moral tale about parallels between contemporary times and early precolonial times, and it is. There really isn't that much depth here. Everything is spelled out very clearly in broad moral brushstrokes. At one point, the producer talks on the phone with some financier in the States and says how happy he is to be able to pay the extras $2 a day. Of course Daniel overhears this, and he totally understands the producer because he used to work in the States himself and speaks English. Oh - burn! You see the producer is embarrassed and Daniel is upset.

Toward the end of the film, the story turns into a commentary on civil-disobedience and rioting. It turns into Hotel Rwanda or The Last King of Scotland: lots of overturned cars, fires and hurt children who can't get to the hospital. The problem is that to this point the film has been such a mishmash of political story lines that you get confused about who is doing what to whom and who is responsible for it.

As much as we want to make the moral equivalent between the Spanish explorers, the Bolivian government and the Spanish film crew, it's a false connection. Water rights are a major concern in Bolivia (they have been from Che Guevara to Evo Morales); rioting by people against the government can be dangrous, but film crews who hire extras for $2 are not really the problem in this context.

I couldn't help but think about Werner Herzog as I watched this film and how he used Cochabamba as one of his headquarters when he shot Fitzcarraldo. He had an deep respect for the Bolivian people and understood issues like fair pay, water rights and keeping peace. Not only is this a movie about filmmakers who do the opposite, but it also seems to have been made by a writer/director who never learned Herzog's lessons. For him, the respect was absolutely endemic to shooting the film and he took it for granted; for Bollain it seems like "respect" is enough of a concept to center a story around. It's not really, because it's so banal.

Stars: 1.5 of 4