In the year 2000, a Spanish film crew arrive in Bolivia to make a movie there, all about what Christopher Columbus got up to after he arrived in the New World, though not in Bolivia. The director is Sebastian (Gael García Bernal), a committed and idealistic artist, who believes his work will be all the more authentic for being filmed using actual Indians as extras, though his co-ordinator Costa (Luis Tosar) is more interested in the money they'll save than any message the final result may put across. On the first day of casting for the natives, one of them makes a fuss about being dismissed after waiting so long, and so Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri) is cast in a plum role...
Although as we see as the story progresses, Daniel is involved in a lot more than simply getting himself and his young daughter Belén (Milena Soliz) in front of the cameras for an easy time of work. The background to this was the so-called Water War of Bolivia, a little reported but important battle against corporate multinationals riding roughshod over the little guys, in this case the indigenous population of the area who were being ordered to pay through the nose for water they felt should be theirs anyway by right. This led to pitched battles in the streets between the Indians with their sticks and rocks, and the authorities, backed by the corporations, with their guns.
We do see scenes of such conflict later on in the film, but it had more on its mind than that, wishing to draw parallels between what had happened to the locals who tried to stand up to the Europeans who crushed them back around five hundred years ago, and the manner in which big business was acting comparably at the turn of the millennium. Screenwriter Paul Laverty was no stranger to politically touchy subject matter, having penned many a script for Ken Loach in his time, but it took a long time for Even the Rain to come to fruition, seeing filmmakers come and go, as well as the man who encouraged Laverty to plough forward with the project, Howard Zinn, on whose writing much of this was drawn.
Sadly, Zinn died just before the film was completed so never got to see it, but the conscience-raising was so well to the fore in the finished production that he would surely have been happy with it. At times director Iciar Bollain displayed an uncertainty about how far the work should go to being a history lesson and the human drama necessary to bring the facts to life and give us someone to identify with, and it was true if you really wanted to know about the conflict the best way would to read more about it rather than watch Even the Rain "cold" as it were, but there was enough here to pique the interest of anyone curious enough to seek out the movie and wish to learn more.
García Bernal was the most internationally recognisable face here, but it was really Tosar who was playing the lead, altering from uncommitted Westerner who was there for his job and to make money to fully engaged participant, surprising even himself as to how far he goes in the final act to contribute towards helping the downtrodden. Not that this made the mistake of depicting the Indians as a bunch of hopeless cases until the outsiders got involved, as we were clear the uprising was very much their own idea and its subsequent success their own doing. In a way it was something of a cliché to have the entry point to this true life tale be that outsider, like one of those eighties "journalists on the front line" movies, but in the character of Daniel you got his people's point of view as well as Costa's alien approach. Besides, the combination of the past brought to life as we saw clips of Sebastian's work illustrating the similarities was clever, and the whole thing a satisfying example of political cinema. Music by Alberto Iglesias.
