Bitter honey

Before the Rains

Crit

If there's anything that fiction and the movies have taught me (having no experience of the principle in my own life, of course), it's that infidelity--that venial wrong so delicious that it seems as if it must be right--inevitably leads to a spiral of worse and worse wrongs, stripping the adulterer of everything he holds dear.

Thus for Linus Roache's Henry Moores, who is the very model of a preindependence plantation-owning Good Englishman: he loves one Indian like a brother and another (played by Nandita Das, from Deepa Mehta's Fire and Earth, so duh) like a wife, and his loves are utterly sincere. Just a couple of problems: she has a husband, and Henry has a wife (the radiant Jennifer Ehle, best known to American audiences as Elizabeth Bennet to Colin Firth's Darcy), who is as perfect as he appears to be. Oh, and one other little problem: for all the apparent equality in their relationships, T.K. and Sajani both call Henry "Sahib."

Inevitably, the Good Englishman does increasingly bad things, until he is revealed as a morally bankrupt representative of a morally bankrupt and decaying system. The humanity of the characters makes the film much less rote than I'm probably making it sound, but still, there's little here we haven't seen before.

Trailers

• Religulous--You know, I actually have a great deal of respect for religious faith in the abstract, and for many thinking believers I know. But I gotta say: you offer me a couple of hours of Bill Maher being a smartass about religion, and it's hard to imagine skipping it.