A village in Syrmia, Vojvodina. Triša is a pig owner on a farm who claims to enjoy his independence as a bachelor. Joška, another farmer, gets Triša drunk and finds a priest who marries him to Goca, a mute, mentally handicapped woman. Triša and Goca get a son. When an art teacher, Reza, arrives in the village to teach painting, Triša falls in love with her and even chases Goca away from his house. A pilot crash-lands with his plane on a tree and continues the affair with Reza, who dumps Triša. Later, Goca is found killed, and the police suspects Triša, but his father gives himself in, instead, thereby saving Triša from prison. The pilot leaves, admitting to Reza he is already married. The villagers tie Triša's arms and legs to church bells, leaving him having above the ground, and then kick him until he dies.
Compared to his wonderful film "I Even Met Happy Gypsies" where he had an impeccable sense for 'magic realism' which he combined with unexpected avant-garde, the director Aleksandar Petrovic delivered a weaker, meandering and vague film "It Rains in My Village", which didn't quite satisfy as the follow-up to his interest in rural areas and minorities living there. Petrovic aimed for a lyrical, surreal, even disconnected approach in his movie style, but some disjointed and underdeveloped moments clash badly with each other, and simply don't fit well. The relationship between the pig farmer Trisa and the mute, mentally handicapped woman Goca is handled the worst, since Petrovic ignores Goca so much it borders on artistic negligence—take, for instance, their sequence of ending up together: Trisa is drunk and then tricked into marrying Goca at night of a ruined church in a montage without any dialogue; in the next scene there is a baby next to Goca while the villagers stare at them; in the next scene the kid is already a five-year old and speaks to a slow-moving snail on a table... all these ellipses happen within only three minutes, with an impossible sense for rushing through such a delicate and crucial sequence that simply is not given due weight, and already the new character is introduced coming to the village in the car, the art teacher Reza, with whom Trisa will have an affair.
But as the old film rules says, before the viewers can sympathize with the poor girl whose brute husband cheats on her, they first need to get to know the girl better, and the movie needs to conjure up emotions towards her, as Babaja rightfully concluded in his similar drama "The Birch Tree". Here, Goca has only maybe 5 minutes of running time in total in the entire film, which is not only too little, but is at the disservice to the excellent actress Eva Ras who had so much more potential. The rest of the film's focus in amost exclusively on the love triangle between Goca, Trisa and a pilot who randomly enters the film and stays there. Petrovic doesn't bother with the classic narrative and instead insists on random collection of episodes, some of which work better, and some worse. One interesting episode is when farmer Joska stumbles upon Czechoslovak cars parked in the meadow, and the drivers listening to the Yugoslav radio, depicting the then actual Soviet-Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, claiming that "500,000 foreign soldiers are in the country" and that they are "shooting at every moving vehicle in their way". Another is the comical bit where Trisa's father confesses on his deathbed that he lied about the murder to protect Trisa, but the man (Bata Zivojinovic) who wore black and pretended he is the priest, just takes his black robe off and reveals to be the police inspector. The ending aimed at being a great tragedy, but since the emotional anchor was missing (Goca's intimate state), it didn't amount to quite the punch it intended, and feels rather overstretched.
Grade:++
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