Trishna

For more than twenty years, Michael Winterbottom has kept up a restless pace, directing almost a movie a year. So he can’t be faulted for being lazy or blocked. And there’s always thoughtfulness, a sense of purpose at the core of everything he’s attempted. But, perhaps as a symptom of his assembly-line approach to his filmmaking, Winterbottom’s track record is, by and large, pretty mixed. For every In this World and A Mighty Heart, he’s churned out half-baked product like Code 46, 9 Songs and his latest, Trishna Winterbottom’s adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Ubervilles.
Winterbottom transposes the story’s 19th century rural English settings to modern-day western India. On the one hand, it’s an inspired choice to superimpose Hardy’s themes of conservatism vying with modernization in an industrial society onto 21st century India, a place whose rural populace is now encountering what those in Hardy’s novels encountered more than a century ago. But Winterbottom’s lack of first-hand familiarity with Indian family and social life drains Trishna of any feeling of authenticity.
Trishna tracks the downward spiral that ensues once the titular character, a pretty 19-year-old hospitality worker at an upscale Rajasthan hotel, falls in love with the hotelier’s feckless son. The more the impressionable Trishna (Freida Pinto) is swept off her feet by Jay (Riz Ahmed), the more she sinks into a kind of emotional and sexual enslavement to him. There’s no looking back once Trishna finds out she’s pregnant after an encounter with Jay and loses her good name following her abortion. Shunned by her father, Trishna leaves her working-class family and goes to live with Jay in his new digs in Mumbai.
For a while, Trishna enjoys a romantic freedom, a make-believe honeymoon with Jay. She entertains dreams of becoming a Bollywood dancer, socializes with fellow Bollywood aspirants. But when she confides in Jay about her abortion, the news drives a wedge in their flimsy relationship—a relationship founded on fantasy—and sets the stage for Trishna’s servitude to her lover and the story’s unraveling. Of course, anyone familiar with Hardy’s novel knows how these things end, and while Trishna stays true to Tess’s bottoming-out into tragic despair, Winterbottom’s version doesn’t feel earned so much as a slogged-toward, foregone conclusion.