Trishna
Michael Winterbottom finds an unexpected new setting for English heartbreaker Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
Overview
If one tried to chart Michael Winterbottom's films by genre, a labyrinthine map would emerge. From comedic road movie The Trip to notoriously, violently graphic The Killer Inside Me; postmodern comedy A Cock and Bull Story; meditative, quiet Genova; and absorbing war films A Mighty Heart and Welcome to Sarajevo, Winterbottom is defined by his chameleon-like ability to consistently, effortlessly shift.
Loosely adapted from Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Trishna is set in contemporary India rather than late 19th-century England. If you're turned off the movie because you haven't read the book, I have one piece of advice: shelve that notion. I know only the basic plot line of Tess, and yet I was won over from the beginning. Trishna is a rich film in its own right.
Starring the inimitably beautiful Freida Pinto as the titular character, the film chronicles her growing relationship with a young, wealthy British transplant in India to look after his father's hotels. Prefacing his responsibilities with a jaunt through the country with his friends from home, he meets Trishna, a poor, hardworking Indian girl living with her family on the desert fringes of Osian, an ancient town in Rajasthan.
The romance develops slowly but commences with a sweeping gesture — Jay organises Trishna a job at his father's hotel in the hills around Jaipur. Her defection from the desert to the city is representative of emerging social migratory trends in the country. Indeed, the social and economic backdrop of India was ripe with adaptive potential for Winterbottom. As he has said, "Hardy was describing a similar moment in English life. A moment when, in the nineteenth century, the conservative rural communities were being transformed by the agricultural and industrial revolutions, when fewer and fewer people were being employed on the land, so people moved to the local towns or cities."
The young couple's emerging relationship is fraught with external pressures and untimely occurrences. Soon, their idyllic romance, set against the backdrop of Mumbai after Jay defects from his designated role in Jaipur for business opportunities, begins to falter. Drawn back into the familial duties he so hates after his father has a stroke, the two move to another hotel where they resume their previous roles of owner and maid, but this time with devastating consequences. Shot beautifully and devoid of Bollywood kitsch, this is one to watch.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=gdFiV9yDHG4
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