Even the Rain: A Confluence of Cinematic and Historical Temporalities

Even the Rain (Icíar Bollaín, 2010) takes a metacinematic approach to the story of a Mexican film crew in Bolivia shooting an historic drama on Christopher Columbus’s conquest. With the water rights riots in Bolivia as a background, Bollaín uses different cinematic styles to establish disturbing parallels between old European imperialism, the recent waves of corporate exploitation, and on the individual scale, the exploitation of Bolivian actors for the benefit of the global film industry. The film within a film device furnishes some insights on the dynamics and pressures that crews face when developing a socially engaged film. Bollaín warns that these productions can fall into a colonialist dynamic by reproducing the imbalances between the ‘visible’ countries in the global film market, and ‘invisible’ countries whose native actors and visually appealing locations are exploited. Even the Rain blends several cinematic tendencies, which at times clash to create a temporal short circuit. One is the visually stunning historic drama reminiscent of Hollywood epics. Another is the documentary-style shooting of Cochabamba’s urban guerrilla crisis, in which the heritage of the 1960s new waves of Latin American cinema clearly emerges. The sequences showing the film crew shooting the historic drama on Columbus at times clash with the other temporalities, and these moments are effective in reinforcing the claim that cinema should maintain a dual role of witness on contemporary abuses and preservation of memory.

The main characters of Even the Rain, director Sebastián and executive producer Costa, find the production of their film put into question with the abrupt intrusion of anti-government protests in Cochabamba in 2000 following the sale of Bolivia’s water rights to a private multinational consortium. As Sebastián and Costa work at re-enacting the Spanish imperialistic ideals of Columbus’s age, they are challenged by the native actor-activist Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri) to wrestle with the parallels between their film and the current water issues faced by the Bolivian people. While Sebastián refuses to take action, Costa will overcome his initial cynicism and understand that in the new millennium, water is the new gold. Differently from the documentaries Blue Gold: World Water Wars (Sam Bozzo, 2008), The Corporation (Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar, 2003), and even the animation Abuela Grillo (Denis Chapon, 2009), Bollaín’s approach to the subject of water rights refrains from pedagogic approaches in favor of a more poetic and evocative narrative. Even the Rain does put in evidence that in order for water to remain a public trust, an active local government will have to collaborate with local citizens. However, this is suggested via an imaginative rather than a prescriptive attitude, using powerful storytelling and the application of conceptual histories and temporalities.

Bollaín’s film emphasizes the continuity of colonialism in its different forms throughout the centuries. She does this while engaging with the changing styles of regional Latin American cinema over different periods. In other words, the history of colonialism and the history of Latin American cinema are not separate histories, but together form an articulated critique of colonialism, made possible thanks to the application of different stylistic approaches to the cinematic medium. The metacinematic narrative and the Cochabamba riot sequences evoke the season of sociopolitical documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s, characterized by the use of location shootings, a mix of professional and non-professional actors, natural lighting, hand held cameras, and a degree of improvisation in the dialogues. The intimate quality of some sequences in Even the Rain, the presence of actor Gael García Bernal, the psychological development, and the character-driven plot suggest a link to the New Waves of Latin American Cinema of the 1990s, which typically offer emotionally charged narratives in realistic settings (Schroeder Rodríguez 33).

The multi-layered hybrid style of Even the Rain brings Latin American Cinema into the new millennium, thanks to its extreme self-reflexivity. I explore how such self-awareness is functional for Even the Rain to locate itself ideologically in antithesis to the frozen nostalgia of Hollywood films depicting...