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.
