Trishna (**3/4)

Transplanting a novel like Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) to the present day might be problematic, since the cultural context is so specific. The rigid hierarchies of Victorian England no longer exist in modern Britain. But they do in India, where traveling from a remote village to a city like Mumbai is, in some respects, to travel in time as well as distance. In addition to altering the setting, Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation (his third Hardy-inspired drama) heavily abridges and alters the plot, but retains the emphasis on its heroine’s humble origins.

In the course of the story young Trishna (Frieda Pinto) travels from her father’s home in a poor village to Mumbai. The apt cliché is, you can take the girl out of the small town, but not the small town out of the girl. That, however, is both more succinct and more direct than Winterbottom’s script. He tells much of the story visually, and in the way his two leads act and speak. Trishna/Pinto, so deferential at the start of the film that it’s startling, changes as she leaves home. A young man (Riz Ahmed) makes this possible, the worldly, wealthy, son of an Anglo-Indian gentleman (Roshan Seth, playing the only secondary character of any interest). Eventually, the young man changes too.

Their relationship develops slowly, and the movie requires patience. I appreciated the subtlety with which Winterbottom depicts the diversity of modern India. Perhaps the strongest scenes, done with minimum dialogue, show the way Trishna’s relationship with her lover changes when the two leave Mumbai. At the same time, I felt that Winterbottom relied too much on the viewer’s knowledge of the lingering effects of caste. One knows it, but does not always feel it, which is crucial in understanding things as they develop. What should be devastating is merely sad.

IMDb link

viewed 7/24/12 7:30 pm at Ritz East (PFS screening) and reviewed 7/25/12

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (***)

“For the elderly and beautiful” reads the legend on the sign of the namesake hotel in this comedy-drama, whose cast amounts to an employment program for some British actors of a certain age. Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton are the married couple. Judi Dench is the recent widow. Celia Imrie is the man hunter, and the aptly named Ronald Pickup her male counterpart. Maggie Smith…is the bigot. Tom Wilkinson is the just-retired businessman returning to his long-ago home, which is Jaipur, India. Which is the home of the once-majestic, still exotic Marigold. And which is where all of these characters have come, even the bigot, because the living (and the medical care) is cheaper in England.

In hardly ten minutes of screen time — I didn’t quite get how it was arranged — they all manage to arrive into the same previously unoccupied hotel at the very same time. Whereupon the young proprietor (Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel, playing a similarly optimistic character) adds “Now with guests!” to the hotel’s sign sign. A bunch of English folk learning life lessons in a poor country is a plot ripe for cliché. These are not completely avoided—most obviously simplistic is the story of the proprietor, whose mother disapproves of his girlfriend, scoffs at his plans to revive the hotel, would prefer an arranged marriage to a Delhi girl, etc. However, the key to this kind of film is to be able to establish the several characters efficiently without making them into clichés, and this is done. Even Wilton’s character, the least likeable and most resistant to India’s charms, is sympathetic, at times, in her despair.

The script (from Deborah Maggoch’s novel) by Ol Parker (Imagine Me & You) is sometimes witty. The direction by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) highlights the colors of the Pink City and avoids making the old folks “cute.” (In this respect, I would contrast it with some of Richard Curtis’s work, like Love, Actually, which I found to be faux “adorable.”) The English seem to specialize in ensemble-cast dramedies, and this one is fairly good, if occasionally meandering.

IMDB link

viewed 5/2/12 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/3/12