Review: One Day Like Rain (SIFF 2007)

One Day Like Rain has a lot of great shots. Shots that contrast something strange with some common activity of daily life. Grainy, washed out images. Impressions of animals and plans in their natural environment. Time-lapse scenes of sunlight filtering through leaves on trees. Indeed, this movie is chock full of great shots.

Unfortunately, that's about the only good thing I can say about this film, which for me alternated between periods of vacuousness, pretention, boredom, and fogginess.

The film presents a very loose thread of a plot: Gina, a quirky teenage girl living in California, has somehow gotten wind of an impending doom facing the world, and she is working out how to save the world as a result. She invests time, effort, chemistry sets, crystals, and her friends in an effort to do this. She makes some sort of chemical concoction that she gives to her friend, Jennifer, who drinks it and later dies. She then goes off with her boyfriend and has a romantic night out in the woods before the world apparently ends.

You may think I'm overly summarizing a lot of plot details that go along to flesh out the above, but I'm not. This is more or less all the scaffolding you get for the overarching story. The rest is a series of ambiguous scenes and empty, needlessly opaque conversations that make up the whole of the movie.

The dialog revolves around fuzzy statements and endless repetition of lines that don't advance the story one bit. "She's got it", you hear over and over. "She's trying to save the world." But you're not really shown how, or why, or when, or what she's really doing. I suppose you're intended to guess. But after a while the guessing game gets really old.

OK, so if there's not much of a plot, there's at least characters and development, right? Wrong. With the exception of Jennifer, I found all the characters flat and uninteresting. They spring out of nowhere, say a few tired lines, sit and stare out into space, and then bam! you're onto the next scene. The movie fails to make me care about any of the characters, which leaves them to be just mindless agents trying to convey something falsely deep and meaningful to the audience.

What the movie lacks in plot, dialog, and character development, it tries to make up in symbolism. Unfortunately, the other extreme takes hold here: the symbols are in your face and practically crammed down your throat. During several scenes, I was almost expecting some subtitling to show up, pointing out, "Hey, look! Two clocks on the wall ticking away...time is running out! Oh wait, check it out, one of them stopped!".

I'm all about films that offer an "experience" of sorts, or have symbolism, or can be studied from many angles. Kubrick is a great example of this: you can watch The Shining as a horror flick, or you can break it down and study its use of symbols, or how the scenes are shot, or what the characters are saying. But it's still a feature, and it's still something you can sit down and watch and enjoy and not have to study. Not so with One Day Like Rain. Director Paul Todisco has made what is potentially a film to study in film school, but what he didn't make is something that a general audience can enjoy without deconstructing it on a white board in a lecture hall.

In the Q&A after the movie, Todisco mentioned that the film came to him in about a week or two. I have to say that it certainly shows. Todisco took his time with how the film was shot. Too bad that his efforts in the other aspects of the movie didn't pan out.

I'm disappointed in SIFF selecting this film for a premiere. I was seriously considering becoming a member this year. But if this is the sort of stuff SIFF will program throughout the year, then count me out.

Overall rating: 1.0/10.0

Details:
Runtime: 90m
Countries: USA
Languages: English