by RYAN GILBEY
Frida Pinto in Michael Winterbottom’s film Trishna, based on Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
Hardy’s Tess finds herself anguished in Rajasthan.
The only way is Wessex
Until Michael Winterbottom sets Far From the Madding Crowd in a futuristic android colony, his version of Tess of the d’Urbervilles will remain the unlikeliest of his run of Thomas Hardy adaptations. The director’s 1996 Jude tied Hardy’s final novel to its birthplace, but The Claim (2000) packed The Mayor of Casterbridge off to the High Sierras in the gold-rush era. Now Trishna finds Tess in modern-day India. The film proves that you can take the girl out of Wessex, but you can’t take Wessex out of the girl. Everything else is up for grabs.
Jay (Riz Ahmed), the English-born son of an Indian hotelier, is bumming around Rajasthan, ostensibly on business but with a distinct air of the gap year about him, when he spots Trishna (Freida Pinto) at a temple.
She teaches him some Hindi phrases, he gives her a lift home. When Jay learns that the family jeep, vital to the income of Trishna and her siblings, has been written off in an accident, he gives her a job at his father’s hotel in Jaipur – the first in a series of chivalrous rescues that can only look in hindsight like preambles to torment.
How pretty is Trishna? When she rides pillion, she doesn’t wear a crash helmet like everyone else, the better for passers-by to admire her face. When she walks among the sick on a dingy hospital ward, you have to remind yourself that this is not a macabre photo shoot or a bad-taste fashion show. Pinto’s core of intelligence complicates her beauty: the character may be unknowable but she transmits faint signals of anguish and disappointment. She knows she deserves better than her fate.
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