RAIN (2001). This was the first film that Christine Jeffs directed, although she was assistant editor for Crush (1992) and Absent Without Leave (1992). She wrote the screenplay for Rain from a novel by Kirsty Gunn. The film explores one of the significant situations in the late 20th- and early 21st-century Western culture, which is not just the disintegration of the family unit, but the specific traits that lead to such disintegration. The tragedy unfolds while a family holidays in a seaside cottage in 1971. The alcoholic mother flirts with a photographer neighbor, the teenage daughter manipulates her sexuality into that situation, and the father and brother are caught somewhere in the middle. There is a darkness, a sense of unease, that permeates the narrative amidst the sensuality and debauchery. The film might be a manual for how a family should not be. Jeffs later directed the international Sylvia (2002), about the life of Sylvia Plath.