The greatest movie ever made..!

Crappy film

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

A mixture of social commentary and period-piece melodrama, "Before the Rains," directed by Santosh Sivan, takes place in India in 1937 during the waning days of British rule.Henry Moores (Linus Roache) is an English businessman living with his wife (Jennifer Ehle, the ghost-wife from "A Gifted Man") and young son (Leo Benedict) in the Madras district of colonial India, where he is supervising the construction of a road that must be completed before the monsoonal rains begin to fall. Moores is also having a clandestine affair with a beautiful Indian housekeeper named Sajani (Nandita Das), who is herself married to an unloving and abusive husband from the village. Through a series of tragic circumstances, the affair manages to have lasting repercussions not only for Moores and his family but for Anglo-Indian relations in the area as well.The story by Cathy Rabin serves as a microcosm for what was occurring on a national scale at that time, as the oppressed natives were just beginning to assert their right to oust the British and become the leaders of their own nation. Thus, Moores' dilemma becomes much more than just a personal one of love and marital infidelity due to the extraordinary circumstances taking place around him. For not only is Henry breaking his own marriage vows with the affair; he is violating any number of social taboos involving race and class structure as well. The situation becomes even more complicated when another of his servants, T.K. Neelan (Rahul Boss), becomes a pawn in Moores' game to extricate himself from the consequences of his actions, and T.K. is finally forced to choose between his desire to be a part of a growing future promised by the Brits and his innate loyalty to his own people who serve under them. The triumph of the screenplay is that each of these characters emerges as a well-meaning but often flawed individual caught in a world greater than his or her own private passions.Even though there are times when the gravity of the social issues feels a bit diminished by the contrivance of the plotting – as if the melodrama were not commensurate in importance and value with the seriousness of the subject matter - on the whole, this is a well-acted, thoughtful and gripping drama that makes important points about colonialism, class structure, personal morality and the untamable nature of the human heart.

I would not call this a film of love and longing at all. The situation is set up in the opening scenes, then it becomes a story of hard realities with no good choices and no happy endings in the disintegrating Raj. The setting is tribal India, not often depicted in literature or film. Beautiful as one might expect from a Merchant Ivory production; intelligent writing and acting. Rahul Bose's character and acting are especially notable. The arrogant Englishman doesn't come off well in this serious drama. The literary term "naturalism" comes to mind. The characters have no control over forces stronger than themselves, thus the metaphor of the monsoon rains.

This movie fails to offer anything new to a genre that has traditionally shown the cross cultural love story underpinned by the politics mid 20th century / pre-WWII India, where the British and their modern ways are bad and the primitive but honest and true Indians are good. Surely such clichéd depictions of the British are rather passé now.Apart from the drama that fuels the second part of the movie the narrative is predictable, the acting is pedestrian and two-dimensional, and the directing obvious and unimaginative.The story really needed to be fleshed out and would certainly have benefited from another half an hour of screen time to give the characters and narrative more depth and give the viewer something to feel some investment in.All in all, rather uninspiring. Oh and Linus Roache just cannot do tragedy - going cross-eyed with emotional pain just doesn't work for me!

Despite the mysteriously positive reviews and high rating, this is an awful movie. Awful enough, that l feel obligated to warn you how bad it is. The movie is set in the final period of the Raj, during the time of India's fight for independence. What follows in the ridiculous plot just fills me with disbelief. What the characters do and how they behave just does not persuade me that the characters exist in that era. For instance, would the young married Hindu housemaid from the local village have an affair with her married Englishman Master, knowing full well that discovery of the affair would likely mean utter social ostracization and shame if not mortal punishment? Unlikely, but still maybe. However, would the same young Hindu housemaid, in the conservative society of India of that era carry on like a half naked Britney Spears in heat, partake in hot outdoor sex during daylight in open view where they might be discovered at any moment? That is not only bloody unlikely, that is a retarded plot line.Such idiocies combined with the poor acting, drove me to leave the cinema an hour into the movie, so i did not watch the second half of the movie. One could only hope the ending is of more intelligence than what i saw in the first half.