Rain

Saturated with an intoxicating blend of regret and danger and driven by two of the finest child performances you'll see anywhere, Rain is a work of considerable mastery, ravishing to look at and rich in its sense of place

Rain, New Zealand, 2001

Director: Christine Jeffs
Production co: Rose Road / Communicado
Producer: Philippa Campbell
Executive producer: Robin Scholes
Screenplay: Christine Jeffs, from the novella by Kirsty Gunn
Cinematography: John Toon
Editing: Paul Maxwell
Casting: Diana Rowan
Art direction: Kirsty Clayton
Costume design: Kirsty Cameron
Original music: Neil Finn, Edmund McWilliams
Makeup department: Alex De Soto, Kevin Dufty, Natalie Wihongi
Visual Effects by: Peter McCully

With: Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki (Janey), Sarah Peirse (Kate), Marton Csokas (Cady), Alistair Browning (Ed), Aaron Murphy (Jim)

35mm, 92 minutes, M

Watch the Rain trailer (8.27MB; 2.14 minutes)

Directed by Christine Jeffs, and adapted by her from Kirsty Gunn's novel, Rain is in the great New Zealand tradition of stories (The Doll's House, The God Boy) where a child or young adolescent begins to penetrate messy adult realities. In this case, young Janey watches ironically as her parents' marriage curdles and her mother drifts into an affair with Cady. The dialogue is laconic and understated but loaded with double meaning. The characters are Kiwis, after all. Sexual frustration may be one strand of the tale, but don't expect an explosion of on-screen passion. Instead, the most lasting image of this sad affair is an image of Sarah Peirse trudging out over the low-tide mudflats to Cady's beached launch. New Zealanders, when they commit sin, are pretty dour about it. On a whole lot of counts, Rain is a remarkable film and a confident feature debut for Jeffs. The whole cast work well, from Sarah Peirse's troubled lower lip to the unaffected horseplay of young Aaron Murphy. But it is Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki who carries the weight of it with great assurance. She has to subtly change pace as Janey first protects, then becomes the rival of, her mother. One key sequence strikes me as a little evasive (we are left wondering what exactly has happened) and, judged against the film's own high standards of character observation, the dosing tragedy is a trifle glib. But I quibble. In its honesty, its unity of vision and its pared-back dramatic sense this is the best New Zealand film I've seen in a very long time.” — Nicholas Reid, North & South, September 2001

“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.” — Philip Matthews, NZ Listener, October 2001

“Saturated with an intoxicating blend of regret and danger and driven by two of the finest child performances you'll see anywhere, the debut feature by one of this country's most highly regarded directors of commercials is a work of considerable mastery, ravishing to look at and rich in its sense of place. Jeffs, the eye behind the Xenical campaign and many of the road-safety ads, moves the setting of the 1994 Kirsty Gunn novel on which the film is based from Lake Taupo to a beach near Mahurangi. Here the waves lap gently, but beneath the lazy rhythms of the holiday there's a storm brewing in the family whose 13-year-old daughter Janey is the story's narrator and narrative dynamo. As Janey's mother Kate and father Ed drink with a fearsome single-mindedness – apart, never together – on the back lawn, she looks after her little brother Jim. And as the adults party through the warm nights, Janey is watching. Into this rather unstable environment comes Cady (Csokas), a itinerant boatie and photographer, who excites the simultaneous interest of mother and daughter. Jeffs teases out the emotional complexities of what follows with enormous assurance, extracting from her cast of five performances of seamless authenticity… Fulford-Wierzbicki and Murphy are beyond praise, managing to be both guileless and laden with foreboding. The elder effortlessly carries the dramatic burden of the story on her slight shoulders without a trace of showiness or self-regard, and around the edges of Murphy's cheerful self-absorption there leaks a sense both of puzzlement and certainty about the unfolding disaster…. The film looks splendid as well. Working with cinematographer John Toon, Jeffs lights the locations like a dreamscape - the setting is 1972 but it could be any time since the 1950s. It's hard to think of a more accomplished debut, or deny that this is the best Kiwi film in the thick end of a decade. Do not miss it.” — Peter Calder, NZ Herald, October 2001

Screenings: Rain screened on 2 July 2008 as part of the Admissions series; and on 28 February 2007 as part of the Adapted: NZ Literature into Film series