I've always been a sucker for "coming-of-age" stories like Catcher In the Rye and Good Times/Bad Times, and films like Summer of '42 and Cinema Paradiso, which turn me into a bowl of mush.
Rain turned me into mush. It's quiet and poetic...and then all shit breaks loose- which is always a good recipe for a film. Rain's also really hard to find, since it's one of those great films that tragically got lost in the shuffle (i.e. Ruby in Paradise)- and these are the films that we live for at FTD. So, trust tired and grumpy leclisse, and don't miss it. Rain is a most-worthy download, and it's sure to impress the girls.
Ohhhhhhhh...and Rain's got an AMAZING Neil Finn OST, but I couldn't find it in lossless. Look for an add-on when I hunt it down.
From Phillip Matthew at the NZ Listener:
Adapted from Kirsty Gunn's novel, Rain is, in its own way, just as absorbing and mysterious as the book. A family of four are holidaying at the beach, at the same place they go every summer. The parents, Kate and Ed, throw raucous parties at night and sleep it off during the day, while 13-year-old Janey minds her little brother, Jim, as they swim and fish and spy on the parties and wonder about adulthood… the film, like the novel, takes Janey's point of view. The voice is tender and nostalgic. ‘He remained miniature and perfect, a tiny bird-boy with a tracery of fragile bones and shoulderblades that stuck out like wings.’ That's Gunn's Janey remembering Jim and it is a beautifully precise image, typical of the book as a whole, and suggestive of the threat that the boy faces. And that sense is conveyed exactly here.
It doesn't take very long for Janey – or the audience – to gather that Kate and Ed's marriage is on the rocks. Drunk for a good portion of the running time, Kate openly flirts with a mysterious stranger named Cady, a photographer who seems to live on a boat, all of which is designed to indicate that he represents freedom, if not just trouble. In an expert piece of casting, Cady – played by the very subtle Marton Csokas with permanent three-day-growth – looks like a younger, trimmer version of Browning's luckless Ed. And as this is the 1970s, everyone is soaked in alcohol. At cocktail parties, archaic tall beer bottles jostle for space with exotic pina coladas and banana daiquiris – this film gets a particular Kiwi gaucheness spot on. Shot around the Mahurangi peninsula – in the book, the location goes unnamed, although it ran in most New Zealand imaginations as Lake Taupo – Rain also gets much of Gunn's melancholy, ominous tone and the sense of a moment being replayed and replayed in the memory until it takes on the quality of myth, developing a grim inevitability and an almost supernatural logic.
That Rain feels like a complete experience at a relatively brief 92 minutes – and that includes a narrative lag at around the halfway point – shows that there wasn't much in the way of plot for Jeffs to take from the book, and plot is secondary to mood, anyway. Rain gets much of its unusual impact, and its unusual intimacy, from the strength of its performances - Peirse is especially good in the film's most difficult and unsympathetic role. It is this intimacy that keeps Rain from playing like Vigil-by-the-bay. There is a focus on odd, everyday, domestic details as though they carried a weight of significance, and some repeated images - the push mower, the bach, the suncream, the boatsheds, the cane deckchairs - are so familiar that to watch the film is almost to undergo an extended flashback; but all this raw Kiwiana is processed through a clear and deliberate arthouse aesthetic. It could seem trite and obvious – the stuff of copywriters – to name Christine Jeffs as the latest in a line that runs from Jane Campion to Alison Maclean to Niki Caro, and the film itself as something like a Kiwi Ice Storm, but there is that kind of sensitivity here and that kind of confidence. Call it a high-water mark
Technical Information:
Title: Rain
Year: 2001
Country: New Zealand
Director: Christine Jeffs
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 5.86 GB
Length: 1:28:01
Programs used: ImgBurn
Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~6200 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps
Audio 1: English- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 224 kb/s
Audio 2: English- Dolby AC3 5.1 @ 448 kb/s
Subtitles: None
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras:
- Production Notes
- Promo Reel
- International Trailers
- Cast & Crew Profiles
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