J Paul Johnson
You won’t see a splashier debut than the Mexican drama Rain (Lluvia), an enigmatic, elliptical portrait of Mexico City’s denizens from first-time feature director Rodrigo García Sáiz, debuting this week at the 2024 Miami Film Festival. For one, the film features a number of the country’s most recognizable, revered performers—Arcelia Ramírez (La Civil), Bruno Bichir (Sicario: Day of the Soldado), Cecilia Suárez (Overboard)—playing against near-newcomers. For another, the script is written by Paula Markovitch (Duck Season, The Box). And for a third, the film employs an experimental approach to its narrative, weaving loosely together six random strands of storyline into an enthralling portrait of a modern city where alienation and isolation predominate and moments of human connection are tenuous and fragile.
The plot, if that is the right word to describe Rain‘s sequence of events, is motivated more than anything by a sense of randomness. In one thread, a taxi driver (Bichir) is driven to suspect his wife is having an affair when his passenger gives him his own home address for a destination, a suspicion driven in no small part by the driver’s own extramarital affair. In another, a teacher (Ramirez) who we learn suffers from an acute depression is mugged and a passerby shot by two young thugs, one of whom follows her to her home to reveal to her he was her former student—and the object of no small pornographic obsession.
Those stories connect, if tangentially, with others. That passerby, the young man who interrupted the teacher’s mugging only to be rewarded with a gunshot to the abdomen, finds in the hospital a sympathetic nurse (Martha Claudia Moreno) who, against her better judgment, elects to take on a dangerous errand in his stead. At that same hospital, a married couple (Suárez and Mauricio Isaac), who witnessed a man randomly collapse on the subway, wait on his care and decide to notify his family, despite their ongoing marital conflict.
Outside, one random encounter leads to the next. One young man chances upon an Asian woman on a pedestrian bridge, perhaps on the brink of suicide—or perhaps not. Despite his comically inept attempts at conversation, the two find a brief and beautiful moment of rapture together, their connection in stark contrast to another occurring simultaneously, a sex worker (Tiaré Scanda) whose new client remembers her—and her violent, bullying ways—from their time together as children in their shared hometown.
Some of these narrative threads find some small degree of resolution, others none at all. What binds them together is their setting, a Mexico City pounded by the incessant pouring rain that gives the film its title and its fragile coherence. That conceit—that it is the rain which connects together these disparate fragments of narrative—may or may not be sufficient for viewers who expect a more conventional dramatic structure with conflicts tidily resolved by a conclusive denouement. To do such isn’t in García Sáiz and Markovitz’s interests; their narrative is more invested in exploring the little rifts and sutures in the random intersections between a city’s isolated, yearning residents, all of them experiencing various levels of ennui and melancholy.
In that sense, Rain is less a conventional drama of a single protagonist’s quest and more an exploration of a city, echoing, two decades earlier, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s debut feature Amores Perros, itself a study of Mexico City, or Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express (whose influence seems present also), or other less-traditional city-based films like Vertov’s dizzying Man with a Movie Camera, the Weimar-era Berlin of People on Sunday, or even the modern Paris of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, all of them in their own ways love letters to their settings.
Whether one finds the constant downpour of Rain a conceit sufficient to connect the disparate stories of these desperate Mexico City residents there is no doubting the immeasurable talent both in front of and behind the camera. Ramirez, so effective as the protagonist of La Civil, makes an unforgettable impression as the clinically depressed teacher on the verge of a shock realization. In smaller roles, Moreno and Scanda shine as the night nurse and sex worker, respectively, who experience reversals of fortune. Leonardo Hermo’s cinematography foregrounds each character’s isolation with noir-tinged compositions that never surrender to cliché (no small trick when nearly every scene requires rain), and Ramiro del Real’s original score, if largely unadorned, freely ranges across styles and idioms to convey the film’s varying moods.
Riding the crest of a wave of excellent Mexican films released over the past couple years (La Civil, All the Fires, The Box, Sansón and Me, Dos Estaciones), Rain too manages to marry technical excellence with narrative innovation. A moment in time occurring over the course of a few hours in a single rain-drenched evening, Rain is both a splashy debut and an evocative, even enthralling account of a city whose residents find their lives disrupted, sometimes briefly, sometimes inalterably, and in unpredictable ways.
Rain makes its North American premiere as recipient of the Jordan Ressler First Feature Award at the 41st edition of the Miami Film Festival April 13, 2024.
