Trishna.    Dir. Michael Winterbottom. With Freida Pinto and Riz Ahmed.  British Film Institute/Trishna Films Ltd 2011 and distributed by IFC, 2012.   Loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

 

Spoiler alert! Some details describe plot elements!

A poor, lower caste, beautiful young woman (Trishna), living with her family in rural northwestern India, encounters a privileged Brit male traveler (Jay). Back in Jaipur, Jay gets his father to give Trishna a job as a server in one of their hotels. Not the very first, but surely a significant indicator of the classist divide separating Jay and Trishna is the inevitability of Trishna’s father accepting the offer for the wages. Trishna must leave home, where she has been counted on to care for younger siblings, and travel across Rathjanistan alone. She quickly becomes the son’s favorite, and that he will have her seems inevitable, after which she suffers complete devastation. For this rupture extends to a moral code that is the very fiber of her being. She steals away back to her village and family, resumes work there, and soon shames her father with her illegitimate pregnancy. He arranges an abortion, then sends her away to an aunt and uncle to work for them. In time Jay comes after her, takes her to Bombay where cohabitation is less conspicuous and shameful. For a while they live almost as equals. But more or less, he stops her from becoming anything other than his servant. After a move back to Jaipur where he manages another of his father’s hotels and she resumes work as a server, they descend deeper into roles of master and servant.

So this is a downer, yeah. It’s a hard movie. I don’t recommend it for immature viewers or anyone else who can’t see beyond the sexual sadism. Which, by the way, had me questioning whether it’s a mere conceit or an apt allegory for social oppression. Because as it is portrayed in the movie it is a vile form of power and control. That it culminates in more violence is entirely believable. Just a note about plot here. It doesn't really matter there isn't much. This film is less about what happens than why it happens. Besides, the film is overlaid with such elaborate location, cultural authenticity, and sociological complexity that plot is just another element on equal footing. What I found believable I also found disturbing: that Trishna was doomed, that in fact, they were all doomed. I saw little more hope for the young school age sister she kissed goodbye before she climbed to a hilltop with a panoramic view and ended her life in a revolutionary act. I could see other choices, but they did not exist within her social paradigm. She freed herself in the only way she could. Just a movie, or a mirror of reality? The film, directed by British filmmaker Winterbottom, was exotic, convincing, tragic, and so culturally specific it left me wondering how it has been seen and interpreted by Indians.