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| Rain |
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  (8/10)
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Runtime: 92 m |
| Public Rating: 9.29 (7 votes) |
Director: Christine Jeffs |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: drama |
Year: 2002 |
| Writer(s): Kirsty Gunn (novel), Christine Jeffs (screenplay) |
| Reviewed by: Avril Carruthers |
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Starring Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki, Sarah Peirse, Marton Csokas,
Alistair Browning, Aaron Murphy.
Written by Kirsty Gunn (novel), Christine Jeffs (screenplay)
Music composed by Neil Finn
The beginning of this movie is a shot from above a young, bikini-clad girl floating spread-eagled on the surface of clear blue water. In that one image of 13-year-old Janey (Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki) we get a great deal of her character. Physically on the brink of womanhood, her immaturity allows a trust born of inexperience. She floats innocently with arms and legs wide open to the sun and the water, seemingly inviting experience without care or tension. From her voiceover we hear she and her family are on holiday in a beachhouse her father built for her mother. The feeling is of summer holidays of one’s childhood and though it is coastal New Zealand in the 1970s it has a quality about it that is suspended both in time and in a place out of touch with normal working existence. A holiday backwater where at low tide the boats rest on blocks on the mud flats.
Janey, who has won prizes for swimming, is teaching her six-year-old brother Jim (Aaron Murphy) to swim.
“Hold your breath. Now go under water,” she commands him.
“Why?” he asks.
“It’ll teach you endurance. Swimming is all about endurance”, she informs him.
“What’s ‘ndurance?”
“Holding on. Endurance is just holding on.”
It strikes us then: a subtle, undeniable sense of unease and forboding.
The family of four seems made up of people who, except for the occasional shared enthusiasms for naughtiness between Janey and little Jim, hardly communicate. One or other of the parents seems always to be sitting in a banana chair in front of the house, drinking scotch, surrounded by squeezed lemons. They hardly ever appear together, still less do they actually talk to one another. Janey’s father Ed (Alistair Browning) is a gentle, sad, man who watches his wife draw further and further away, with complete helplessness to know how to avert it. Her mother Kate (Sarah Peirse) is attractive, bored and distant, her attempts at mothering both inadequate and desultory. Unable to reach her sullen, willful daughter, Janey in turn is resentful that her mother is not what she wanted and expected a mother to be. A holidaying photographer Cady (Marton Csokas) who is living on his boat invites them out fishing. Unlike Janey, Kate shows her lack of proficiency in the water, and half seas over in more than one sense, nearly drowns. Cady rescues her and later, Janey witnesses the beginning of their affair. He takes a photograph of the sultry Kate which Janey immediately seizes on. She wants him to photograph her, to see her, like that.
There is a marked difference portrayed between the attitudes of the adults and Janey. In Kate and Cady’s illicit affair, in the constant drinking and the tired parties where everyone stands around or at most goes skinny-dipping in the dark there is a sense that the adults are all seeking escape from reality, not wanting to see what is in front of them. Part of the suspense we feel as an audience is from the growing feeling that no-one is paying attention to what is undoubtedly going to happen and that the several threads of the story are about to unravel out of anyone’s control. Janey on the other hand is most awake and alert to opportunities. She is actively curious, determined to experience her own sexuality on her own terms. Seeming to know what she is doing, with urgent steps she leads an uneasy Cady deep into a pine forest on the pretext of a photography shoot. Sensuously she touches and smells the slippery pine-needles. Even so, the shot of her soft hand, still pudgy with puppy fat, exploring the mature man’s hair-covered chest, is incongruous and shocking. What her explorations entail is not what she expected. Once again we see her from far above, lying alone on the pine-needles, this time naked, her legs now closed, her body cruciform. The other consequences of her wanting to know, wanting experience, are devastating. Little bright shrimp Jim, on explorations of his own, carries endurance too far and holds on too long, himself finding out a secret he can share with no-one. Both he and Janey have crossed a threshold into a place from which they can never return. All are lost as a result.
The performances of the adults, while intricately layered, are deliberately understated, slow-moving and restrained, even lazy, like the pace of the movie. The children are exceptional and both shine with total commitment to their roles – indicating some extremely sensitive handling, and not just in this, by Director Christine Jeffs in her debut feature. Director of Photography John Toon’s camera-work with its focus constantly in the foreground contributes to the feel of something undiscernible in the background, something coming which as yet we cannot fully see. New Zealand composer Neil Finn, formerly of his brother Tim’s band Split Enz, explores the inner journeys of the characters, sometimes a little too heavy-handedly for the subtlety of the moods but otherwise providing an evocative match for the beautiful scenic setting.
Although the movie is almost entirely shot in bright sunshine or fine weather the overall mood aptly matches the title Rain. Contrasting the theme of endurance is that of fluidity, fragility and transience, the tidal ebb and flow, the changing positions of the boats, the changing partners. Ed is a drowning man unable to do anything to save his marriage. Kate also is trying to drown, in the watery oblivion of booze. The portrayal of a marriage which, in its lack of communication or reciprocal caring, has no basis for enduring, is very real. There is a constant sense of something brooding and precipitate, the wet softness of tears, all brightness covered with cloud, and at the end little Jim become much more somehow, part of the environment, the sky and the sea, while for Janey endurance takes on yet another meaning.
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