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Film Review: Christopher Columbus revisited in Even the Rain
Friday, February 18, 2011
Filed Under: Arts & Entertainment


"Icíar Bollaín’s bluntly political film “Even the Rain” makes pertinent, if heavy-handed, comparisons between European imperialism five centuries ago and modern globalization. In particular it portrays high-end filming on location in poor countries as an offshoot of colonial exploitation.

The movie is set in and around Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third-largest city, which the movie’s fictional penny-pinching film producer, Costa (Luis Tosar), has chosen as a cheap stand-in for Hispaniola in a movie he is making about Christopher Columbus. The year is 2000, and Costa is unprepared to deal with the real-life populist uprising in Bolivia after its government has sold the country’s water rights to a private multinational consortium.

Local wells from which the people have drawn their water for centuries are abruptly sealed. Riots erupt when the rates charged by the water company prove ruinous. The rebellion ends only after the protests have brought Bolivia to a standstill and the company has withdrawn. The title, “Even the Rain,” refers to the notion that catching rainwater would be illegal.

Just as Costa and the film crew arrive to make a high-minded, myth-shattering exposé of Columbus’s exploitation and suppression of native populations, hostilities between Bolivian peasants and the government are about to explode. For Sebastian (Gael García Bernal), the project’s idealistic director, the movie-to-be is a chance to subvert the myth of Columbus as a heroic New World explorer by portraying him as a rapacious, greedy perpetrator of atrocities and a despoiler of nature.

Costa has no interest in the people of Bolivia and is overheard boasting on the telephone to a financier that the clueless extras are thrilled to be paid as little as $2 a day."

Get the Story:
Movie Review: Even the Rain (The New York Times 2/18)

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