Some Rain Must Fall: Chinese drama exposes cracks in a middle-class family

4/5 stars

It is substantial and stylish and revolves around a woman weighed down by the ever-widening cracks within her family, and her long-suppressed doubts about her desires in her comfortable middle-class life.

Anchored by Yu Aier’s turn as the woman careering towards a complete breakdown, Some Rain Must Fall offers bristling family drama with elements drawn from film noir and suspenseful psychological thrillers.

But the film is neither derivative nor expansive, and is bolstered by Qiu’s taut screenplay and cinematographer Constanze Schmitt’s chiaroscuro-lit camerawork – which manages to transform a nondescript city into a combination of pallid interiors and shadowy neon-lit streets.

Set in an anonymous city in mainland China – it is, in fact, Qiu’s hometown, Changzhou, in Jiangsu province – Some Rain Must Fall unfolds across three days of its protagonist’s life after an accident at her daughter’s high school.

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Agitated by a heated conversation on her mobile phone, Cai (Yu) throws an astray basketball to a group of unruly students and somehow ends up knocking an elderly woman unconscious.

The victim’s demands of compensation imperil the family finances – there’s the budget for sending the sulky Lin (Di Shike) to study overseas and the costs in looking after the Alzheimer’s-stricken mother-in-law (Cai Yuqiang).

The incident also reveals the schisms between Cai and her husband Ding (Wei Yibo).

Beneath their bourgeois trappings – two cars in the underground garage, abstract art on the walls – the gaunt Cai is growing tired of a life of market trips, yapping neighbours and school runs with her unappreciative daughter.

But her divorce papers remain unsigned by her husband, who wants to cling on to the marriage but also dismisses his wife’s parents – and her – as “f*****g peasants”.

Qiu never spells out where Cai intends to move to and who with, with only her small, sporadic acts of intimacy with her housekeeper (Gu Tingxiu) serving as a hint of Cai’s reason to cut herself loose from her current life.

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But that playground accident also spawned some real danger, as Cai is repeatedly taunted and even assailed by a gang of mysterious teenagers – harbingers of doom akin to the grey skies that threaten to open.

As its title suggests, some rain will eventually have to fall to relieve or reconcile the situation – and that indeed will happen. Before that, however, Qiu guides his protagonist – and the viewers – through a journey of the seemingly trifling yet equally damaging dysfunctions in the lives of the moderately prosperous in 21st-century China.