Riz Ahmed and Frieda Pinto star in Michael Winterbottom's surprisingly strong, Indian take on Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
The premise of Michael Winterbottom's Trishna is as annoying as people who draw the bulk of their cultural references from Slumdog Millionaire. But this modern-day Indian take on Tess of the D'Urbervilles rises above and beyond all expectations. It embraces the remnants of colonisation still present in the Indian class system and presents something new in the gulf between protective country living and the possibilities and pitfals of the city.
The story follows Frieda Pinto as naive Trishna. Whisked away from the security of her family by Riz Ahmed as Jay, the wealthy son of an Asian British businessman (a cut glass Roshan Seth) she finds herself completely at his mercy. With his father's fleet of hotels at his fingertips, Jay quickly goes about positioning Trishna as a maid at his beck and call and it's this character that makes this risky adaptation work. The overwhelming power and respect he's afforded as a wealthy Brit abroad allows him to at first charm, then baldly manipulate the people around him without facing any questions.
Winterbottom's imagery works just as hard as his characterisation. It's in no way as idyllic as Hardy's and he is clever not to go down that well-trodden path of romanticising simplicity or hardship. There are no close-ups of Trishna's hands working away in the fields and cameras never zoom in to her basic country home. Instead, his depiction of Trishna's existence away from the all-consuming Jay is matter-of-fact in the way that she sees it.
The romance and emotion comes via the unforgettable music by Amit Trivedi and Shigeru Umebayashi who create a folk-inspired contemplative score against which to set this contemporary tale of power and manipulation. The music rises, and inflates itself menacingly in time with Jay's slow burning, egomaniacal idea of love, which, though it doesn't strip away Trishna's options, does shatter her hope of a future her family might accept.
With so much of the film in Hindi, balanced carefully on such a quiet, sometimes sluggish script, Michael Winterbottom probably doesn't have a hit on his hands, but this artisitic adaptation doesn't disappoint.
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