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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 12/11/2012 : 14:52:57
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Whether it's by design or accident, former Mexican child star Gael Garc�a Bernal has chosen to reject the expected path of a consummate actor who could "get by" on his smoldering good looks. He could have gobbled up all the cookies in Hollywood's gift basket and coasted from predictable rom-com to brooding action hero.
Instead, he's consistently appeared in films that are compelling enough not only to cross borders, but to come to award-winning attention. Let's hope Even the Rain is one of them.
Bernal stars as an obsessed film director making a dramatized documentary of Christopher Columbus' exploitation of the native South Americans whose lands he claimed in the name of the Spanish king and queen. He easily acknowledges the explorer's obsessions, but is too driven to see how clouded is his own judgement.
The backdrop of this docu-drama is a Bolivian rain-forest settlement whose native residents are battling for their very survival. Their water supply is being cut off. Dead.
Within a complex web of international vested-interest machinations, funded by The World Bank - [whose loans are underwritten by such pseudo-benevolent offices in San Francisco, and sanctioned by various heads of state]- the film-makers are forced to take sides.
It's the almost predictable parallels of social corruption over centuries and given some all-too human faces, that provides the core of the film. That there's room for humor as well as the growing sadness of personal consequences is a tribute to all the cast and award-winning former actress -director Iciar Bollain.
But the film's no dry, wordy polemic. Bollain enlivens it with characters who subvert assumptions about each other. Much of her film is based on actual events.
She provides a light-touch as well as a poetic choice of juxtaposing images. Unerringly, she finds profound beauty in the quirky, and especially in the ideologically passionate. She's simply unafraid, and that empowers her characters. In a refreshing way, it empowers us, too.
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Even The Rain
