Available on DVD: “Even the Rain”

Luis Tosar and Gael Garcia Bernal in Even the Rain

Icíar Bollaín’s bluntly political film Even the Rain makes pertinent, if heavy-handed, comparisons between European imperialism five centuries ago and modern globalization. In particular it portrays high-end filming on location in poor countries as an offshoot of colonial exploitation.

The movie is set in and around Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third-largest city, which the movie’s fictional penny-pinching film producer, Costa (Luis Tosar), has chosen as a cheap stand-in for Hispaniola in a movie he is making about Christopher Columbus. The year is 2000, and Costa is unprepared to deal with the real-life populist uprising in Bolivia after its government has sold the country’s water rights to a private multinational consortium.

Local wells from which the people have drawn their water for centuries are abruptly sealed. Riots erupt when the rates charged by the water company prove ruinous. The rebellion ends only after the protests have brought Bolivia to a standstill and the company has withdrawn. The title, Even the Rain, refers to the notion that catching rainwater would be illegal.

Just as Costa and the film crew arrive to make a high-minded, myth-shattering exposé of Columbus’s exploitation and suppression of native populations, hostilities between Bolivian peasants and the government are about to explode. For Sebastian (Gael García Bernal), the project’s idealistic director, the movie-to-be is a chance to subvert the myth of Columbus as a heroic New World explorer by portraying him as a rapacious, greedy perpetrator of atrocities and a despoiler of nature.

Costa has no interest in the people of Bolivia and is overheard boasting on the telephone to a financier that the clueless extras are thrilled to be paid as little as $2 a day.

During the casting process a rebellion flares up when Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri), a fiery young Indian who traveled a long distance with his daughter to try out for the film, insists on an audition even though the roles have been filled. He makes such a fuss that hundreds of others who had lined up for hours without being tested are given a chance.

Daniel, a charismatic firebrand, wins the role of Hatuey, a Taino Indian chief who spearheads the rebellion against Columbus’s forces. When Daniel is not being filmed in the movie, he leads the protests against the new government-protected water company. Arrested and beaten up, he is temporarily freed only after the filmmakers intervene.

At its best Even the Rain, directed by Bollaí from a screenplay by Paul Laverty (The Wind That Shakes the Barley), suggests a politically loaded answer to Truffaut’s Day for Night. The scenes of Columbus’s arrival and subjugation of the indigenous people, whom he coerces to convert to Roman Catholicism, are milked for inflammatory outrage. Having persuaded the Indians to collect gold dust in a river, Columbus makes them slaves. Brutal punishment is meted out for malingering. In the most horrifying scene — the money shot, if you will — Hatuey and 12 other prisoners are tied to crosses and burned alive.

Although the movie punches hard, its impact is diminished by an overly schematic screenplay and excess conceptual baggage. An unnecessary layer involves the filming of a documentary about of the making of the film. The story brings in two heroic 16th-century missionaries, Bartolomé de las Casas and Antonio de Montesinos, who defend the Indians but they are given minimal screen time.

A more serious problem is the moral seesawing of Costa and Sebastian. While Costa suddenly and mysteriously acquires a social conscience that leads him to risk his life by driving a girl wounded in protests to the hospital, Sebastian, alarmed that his pet project is in jeopardy, callously begs him to stay and finish the movie. A film is forever, he argues, while the social turmoil around them will be resolved and quickly forgotten.

Even the Rain is splendidly panoramic. The scenes of Columbus’s arrival and of his imperialist and religious sloganeering, and of the carnage he wreaks, have a grandeur and a force reminiscent of Terrence Malick films. The segments about the chaotic water riots have a documentary immediacy.

In his weighty portrayal of Costa, Tosar goes as far as he can to make the character’s change of heart believable, but he can’t accomplish the impossible. And as Anton, the cynical, hard-drinking actor playing Columbus, Karra Elejalde lends the film a welcome note of antic unpredictability.

Consciously or not, Even the Rain risks subverting its own good will. You can’t help but wonder to what degree its makers exploited the extras recruited to play 16th-century Indians. Inevitably Even the Rain is trapped inside its own hall of mirrors.