| Reviewer Roundup |
| 1. |
 | Harvey Karten |
| review follows |
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| 2. |
| Steve Rhodes |
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Review by Harvey Karten
3 stars out of 4
When you "came of age" (meaning the time you realized that
you were a human being not tied to you mom's umbilical), who
were your role models? If you're a contemporary American,
your model may not have be Michael Jackson or or George W.
Bush, because Americans do not have heroes. Chances are
you more or less followed in the footsteps of your more mature
friends or older brother. If you were about thirteen in New
Zealand in 1972 as is the principal character in Christine Jeffs'
film "Rain" (based on Kirsty Gunn's novel of the same name),
you watched your own parents. In Jeffs' atmospheric and
moody movie set around an isolated seaside holiday area facing
a muddy beach bordering crystal-green waters, thirteen-year-old
Janey (Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki) settles in with her parents,
whose marriage is disintegrating slowly but inevitably, while
neither Janey nor her precocious ten-year-old brother Jim
(Aaron Murphy) can do a thing about it.
What makes "Rain" different from most other coming-of-age
dramas is that two people of different generations are crossing
boundaries. The forty-something Kate (Sarah Peirse) has done
some traveling in her day including a trip to Japan where ("we
had a marvelous time") and is not content with the domesticity
incumbent on a middle-aged married woman with kids. Not for
her the endless round of making coffee and tea and cleaning up
after her brood. When she spots a handsome and well-built
photographer, Cady (Marton Csokas who resembles Russell
Crowe), she sees a chance to transcend her staid ways and test
new boundaries. In the same manner her daughter, while
frustrated with her passive father, Ed (Alistair Browning), closely
watches the way her mom plays up to the hirsute and somewhat
eccentric Nikon-bearer who like others of his good looks and
charm need hardly lift a muscular arm to seduce a gal.
The story gets its title not from any actual precipitation, but
from the cloudy days serve as metaphor for the brewing storm
about to break on one dramatic day one which would (as the
cliche goes) change the individuals' lives forever. As the
distraught Ed, noting the uselessness of his building a vacation
retreat to bind the family more closely, burns within at his
impotence, Janey begins to wonder about this thing called sex
which is touted as so wonderful and yet seems to be able to
break a family apart. She ignores the one fellow her own age
who makes a couple of passes (kissing him to scare him away),
and makes a beehive for the comely cameraman to explore her
power as a female.
As the film's cinematogapher John Toon pans the area,
exploiting the threatening skies to evoke the mood of the
perpetually bored and drinking vacationers, we're tempted to
forego that trip to the southern reaches of the Pacific in favor of
more lively adventures in Spain or Japan. At the same time, we
are treated to a well-acted, restrained and intelligent piece that
should make the discriminating audience think back to their own
joys and anguish that always accompany that time of life in
which we carve new identities.
Copyright © 2002 Harvey Karten
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