Now is the Winterbottom of our sub-continent made glorious cinema by this son of gawk.
TRISHNA is SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE out of TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES and is the perfect antidote to the saccharine saffron sanitised passage to India presented in THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL.
Winterbottom has taken the Hardy road before– a straight rendition of JUDE THE OBSURE and a frontier Western take on THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE called THE CLAIM.
Tess’s transformation and transmigration to Trishna is successful in that contemporary India represents a place of expansive and explosive industrialisation, education, and technology, just as the England of Thomas Hardy’s era was, and the heroine’s tragedy remains, that she has one foot in the old, traditional world and one foot in the burgeoning, brave new one.
Trishna is played by the breathtakingly beautiful Freida Pinto who gave SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE much of its luminance. Her co-star is Riz Ahmid playing Jay, an amalgam of the two men in the novel, Angel and Alec, an interesting conceit that works well in this particular telling of the tale.
Trishna lives a poor, sheltered life exacerbated when her father incapacitates himself in a vehicle violation. Wealthy young Jay, fresh to India having been brought up in England and now back to run his father’s hotel, offers Trishna work. He is besotted by her beauty and they commence an affair. What appears to be a modern relationship slips into a more traditional one where Trishna ostensibly becomes a sex slave, her new found emancipation emaciated by a chilling chauvinism.
Shot in Rajasthan and Mumbai, Winterbottom delights in the travelogue aspects of the film, with cameras mounted on vehicles in both rural roads and city streets. This gives a veracity and energy to the film’s theme of emerging industrial India contrasting with traditional landscapes, local fauna, specifically simian, and the colours and light of the subcontinent.
The pervading presence of Bollywood prevails as Jay dabbles in its production and Trishna, like all young women apparently, mimics dance moves and takes classes in choreography.
Like SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, TRISHNA boasts a gorgeous score with music by Shigeru Umebayashi and songs by Amit Trivedi, which gives the film a rich aural texture.
Michael Winterbottom’s TRISHNA opens at cinemas on Thursday 10th May, 2012.
© Richard Cotter
2nd May, 2012
Tags: Sydney movie review- TRISHNA, Michael Winterbottom, Frieda Pinto, Riz Ahmed, Shigeru Umebayashi, Amit Trviedi, Sydney Arts Guide, Richard Cotter.