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RAIN
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From the moment of their conception, children unwittingly sap their parents' sexuality. Sleep deprivation, the small voice at the midnight bedroom door, the disapproving glower when parents embrace or kiss, and then last when they dress to flaunt what they do not yet have and even less understand. All this is part of evolution's cynical bait-and-switch: get you hot, get you pregnant, get you married, get you bonded to the offspring, and evolution is then done with you. A father is not virility, he is authority; a mother is not voluptuousness, she is nurture.
In a vaguely suggested early 1970's, New Zealanders Kate (Sarah Peirse) and Ed (Alistair Browning) have settled down to a summer by the beach, a gravel-strewn tidal mud flat surrounded by needle-floored forests of tall pine, Lake Winnipesaukee with a Kiwi accent. Here they sit, fishing and drinking the days away until the sun sets and the mobile beach party starts up, everyone's sliding doors opening onto the barbecues, swigging beer, passing joints, and goading one another into midnight skinny-dipping, white buns flashing across the sand.
Though the romance and attraction have leached out of their marriage, Kate and Ed are joined together by and for their children, four-year-old angelic Jim Little and his older sister Janey (Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki), still a brown-berry urchin but precociously aware that the circling boys are after a kiss, a rub, or the unknown more. Janey is our narrator and principal observer, like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Proto-sexual, selfish, bossy, she may be intended as a refraction of her mother, but all too often she seems merely sullen. Through her we glimpse Kate's despair and building infatuation (gathering like gray storm clouds) with boat-owning mate Cady who, childless and single, is everything that her husband Ed perhaps once was but now is not - free, liberated, handsome, mysterious, and hungry for her.
From here you can more or less connect the dots … and you will have plenty of time to do so, for Rain drifts through scene after scene of three-word sentences and yearning expressionless glances. Does Ed's morose passivity signal he knows his marriage is dead? Is Kate's "quiet day" code for a long slow binge? Perhaps Kirsty Gunn's novel made clear. The movie leaves us grasping at dialog straws.
Opacity is not intrinsic to mood pieces. For all their flaws, Under the Sand, The Deep End and even Signs and Wonders nevertheless convey what their protagonists feel - and all of them are powered by early movement. Rain does not, and its action comes late. It was adapted from a novel described as 'lyric' and comes across as the dramatization of real events in someone's life that had tremendous meaning to their author but whose meaning is lost because they have been removed from their context. Are Kate and Ed morose because, as Sixties free spirits, they thought they would change the world, only to find themselves long-haired reflections of their parents, settling down to a comfortable doughy bourgeois complacency slowly to seed in a cottage by the shore? Have they found free love has a price after all, and the price is children? It's a plausible explanation but we have no way of knowing.
Nor does Rain use its events to resolve its characters' tensions. In The Ice Storm, a movie that is structurally and temporally parallels, a defining event precipitates resolutions (for good or ill). In Rain, a random tragedy simply spirals all three protagonists further into personal insularity.
It's hard to condemn a movie that so much wanted to be meaningful, and whose acting seems so good. But the imitative fallacy is one of indy films' great traps. A movie about bored people is boring. We do not give points for intention, we score for results. Rain does not offer them.