In Even the Rain, Gael García Bernal plays a filmmaker making a movie in Bolivia about Christopher Columbus’s colonization of the New World (think of something in the spirit of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God). He’s in Bolivia because, “You can negotiate things here. Hotels, transports, catering.” So Bernal’s character is making a movie about exploitation, by doing some exploiting of his own — an irony that becomes increasingly apparent as the indigenous population in the village where he’s filming begin to revolt against the government for raising the price of water. In one scene, Bernal chastises an official, saying he thinks the protesters “demands are reasonable. If someone earns $2 a day, he can’t pay a 300 percent increase in the price of water.” The official replies, “That’s what I’m told you pay the extras.” Burn. In the words of the trailer, “500 years [after the conquest] … not that much has changed.” As the violence increases, Bernal’s character is forced to sort out his own politics — not just his stated beliefs, which have always been anticolonialist, but his lived ones as well. The movie is diving into some big questions — imperialism, colonialism, Western entitlement, and whether moviemaking itself is inherently exploitative, among others — but it’s hard to tell if it will ultimately address them in a way that’s enlightening or patronizing. In other words, this is a trailer that does its job: We’re going to have to see the movie to find out.
