The Rain People (1969)

If the protagonist of The Rain People were a man on the run from a dark past involving some girl called Doris, instead of being a pregnant woman who has doubts about family life with her husband, The Rain People could have been a Wim Wenders movie. But it's not. It's an early Francis Ford Coppola direction. The script of this movie must've been minimal. The plot isn't exactly bustling with action, which is all good. We are introduced to Natalie, as the woman is called, on the road, talking to her husband on a pay phone. We know next to nothing about her. She picks up a hitchhiker, a youngish man with an unsettling nickname, Killer. The guy turns out to be an ex-footballer who got a severe blow in the head during a game. He's got a thousand dollars in his pocket but nowhere to go. Natalie doesn't really know what to do. Unwilling to make any commitments, she makes it clear to him that she wants to continue her journey alone. But it turns out it's not that easy.
This might not be a movie that gave me plenty to think about. But as character drama & aesthetically satisfying mood piece, it works OK. Coppola doesn't sentimentalize. He has made a film that despite of the rawness of several scenes is imbued with a gentle fondness for the characters. After having watched one dreadful hour of Vicki Christina Barcelona* yesterday, Coppola's movie actually feels comparatively feminist. This is a film about why women are expected to commit and different ways of rebelling against that. Like many other American movies, The rain people is about the big car-on-the-open-road-going-west quest for Freedom. But it isn't the worst film about that subject. It evades some clichés (does that have anything to do with the fact that the protagonist is a woman?). Actually, this is a film that is neither cynical nor idealistic. It just shows how hard to be indifferent and how easy it is to have impossible hopes and make bad choices.

* A redeeming fact about the movie might be that it's not only the women that are portrayed as bimbos. Men are, too. It's a horribly misanthropic film. Afterwards you wish to call some guy in the White house or the Kremlin and ask them to fire off all the nuclear weapons they've got. I'm surprised how unimpressed I am with that perspective.