Michael Winterbottom (2011)
Michael Winterbottom has already directed two cinema adaptations of Thomas Hardy – Jude (1996) and The Claim (2000), the latter based on The Mayor of Casterbridge. If he hadn’t the idea that this new film is based on Tess of the d’Urbervilles might not even be taken seriously. This isn’t because Trishna is set in present day India rather than nineteenth-century Wessex but because Winterbottom has chosen to collapse Alec d’Urberville and Angel Clare into a single character. It’s one thing to see Alec and Angel as two aspects of male tyranny, quite another to dramatise this idea by making them one man. (Winterbottom also wrote the screenplay this time, whereas Hossein Amini adapted Jude the Obscure and Frank Cottrell Boyce The Mayor of Casterbridge.) The composite Jay Singh, a wealthy young British Asian, in India managing a hotel owned by his father, has his faults – he’s egocentric and chauvinistic – but, for most of Trishna, he’s more Angel Clare than Alec d’Urberville. You can’t understand how Trishna (Tess) is going to want or be forced to kill him until, late on in the film, Winterbottom hurriedly changes Jay into a sexually abusive bastard who deserves a kitchen knife in his stomach.
In an interview in the current issue of the Curzon magazine, Winterbottom talks about the importance in Hardy of social forces and individual personality as determinants of human lives but these influences aren’t held in tension in Trishna. Although the community the heroine comes from appears to be Christian, you still expect – particularly in view of the plot of the Hardy novel – the Indian caste system to be an imperative in the story. Yet it’s Trishna’s own character that seems to explain, almost entirely, her fate. When Jay first takes up with her, he gives Trishna a job in the hotel and arranges hotel management training for her. Trishna leaves and goes home to her family when she discovers that she’s pregnant with Jay’s child (she then has an abortion) but he makes contact with her again and they go to Mumbai. There, Jay and a group of friends get involved in making pop videos. This part of Trishna’s life with him ends when Jay’s father is taken seriously ill. Jay goes back to London for a while and, when he returns to India, resumes family hotel management, with Trishna once more his employee – and sex object. Trishna is a talented dancer – Jay first sees her dancing in a Rajasthan temple – but he’s dead against the idea of her pursuing a career as a performer. When the couple are shown as part of their social group in Mumbai, Winterbottom stresses how different Trishna is from the Western-looking diva-ish star of the films the young men are making – but she’s strikingly different too from all the other Indian girls working in the Mumbai entertainment industry. They seem puzzled by Jay’s autocratic attitude and Trishna’s acceptance of it.
Freida Pinto is very well cast to fit Winterbottom’s conception of Trishna but her limitations as an actress reinforce the narrowness of that conception. Hardy subtitled his novel ‘A Pure Woman’: he must have known that many contemporary readers would find Tess anything but. With the lovely and ladylike Pinto in the role and the time and place changed, there’s no friction between Trishna’s behaviour – and how this might be perceived – and her honourable nature. (And her family in rural India don’t appear to be scandalised that she’s unmarried and pregnant.) Very few of Trishna’s experiences have any of the emotional extremity of Tess’s. This is the fault of the screenplay rather than the actress but, when Trishna eventually stabs Jay, we’re as incredulous as she looks to be at what she’s done. Freida Pinto is the antithesis of feistiness – it’s impossible to believe her passive Trishna capable of such an act of violence. (In any case, why doesn’t she just walk out of this second hotel job, and a life with Jay, as she did the first? It isn’t as if Trishna – unlike Tess – has nowhere else to go.)
Although it’s fundamentally misconceived, Winterbottom seems to have one or two interesting ideas with the Alec-Angel character. There’s an implication that the British Jay has a more old-fashioned approach to sexual relations with women in India than his male contemporaries there. It was clear from Rage and Four Lions that Riz Ahmed was a highly talented young actor. The only real strong point of Trishna is that it gives him the opportunity to go further in a role – even if this turns out to less an opportunity than an impossible task. Ahmed’s portrait of Jay is socially precise and his acting is emotionally alert. He also shows great tenacity: even when Winterbottom suddenly turns his character into a heartless, Kama Sutra-reading sexual tyrant, Ahmed keeps things interesting by suggesting that Jay is getting this way because he’s bored and resentful of his boredom. The trouble is, this turns the climax – the murder of Jay and the final suicide of Trishna – into a bad joke rather than the heroine’s tragedy. The mostly dark-toned cinematography is by Marcel Zyskind and the swift editing by Mags Arnold. The music is a mixture of vivid Indian pop tunes by the Bollywood composer Amit Trivedi and vague, important-movie plangency by Shiger Umebayashi.
11 March 2012
