Trishna

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Trishna
Directed by: Michael Winterbottom
With: Freida Pinto, Riz Ahmed and Roshan Seth
2012

Trishna transports you in India with its colours, dresses, lights and landscapes. Whether it is an authentic India, though, is open to discussion…

Based on Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Trishna tells the story of a young girl who, from a rural village in Rajasthan, is offered a job in Jaipur by Jay, the son of a rich hotel owner, who falls in love with her. The couple have an affair, but Trishna, pushed by the strict moral laws of rural Rajasthan, is obliged to runaway and to abort the child she is inadvertantly carrying. Tracked down by Jay, she eventually agrees to move with him to Bombay, where the couple live a ‘modern’, carefree urban love story. When Jay is forced to come to Rajasthan, to take over his dad’s business, however, the couple’s fragile equilibrium brakes and the romantic adventure suddenly turns into exploitation, leading the characters towards tragedy.

By adapting a 19th century Western moral novel to a fast changing society such as India’s, with a different religion, different social system and different conception of love, Michael Winterbottom embraced a challenge, if not a risk. The movie does little or nothing in order to justify the choice. One might wonder if the only purpose of the plot is that of adapting the novel to a new scenario. Deprived from any real insight into the moral laws of modern India, the viewer can’t but wonder if such a story would be possible at all there.

This ambiguous west-east relationship is also amplified by the fact that in the movie Jay is in reality a western character. He grew up in England, he does not speak Hindi, his tastes and habits are not far from those of a Londoner. Trishna, on the other hand, comes from rural India. Being astonishingly beautiful and the elder working daughter in a poor and numerous family, she represents India in all its potential and mysterious charm. What could have developed into a great encounter by two equally powerful, although different, conceptions of love deflated into a weird and superficial domination relationship between man and woman, rich and poor and, one is tempted to say, West and East.

But what probably remains most inhibiting for the plot to take heights, is Trishna herself. She has no depth: she says yes to everything she is proposed and she never speaks her mind. We will never know how she lives and understands her relationship with Jay, so much that her final gesture seems as much unexpected as inconsequential, taking away from the tragic end any moral depth or bitter lesson.

Through its decadent palaces, beautiful draperies and wonderful landscapes Trishna did bring me back to Rajasthan. Yet, it did not open my eyes to an Indian, authentic scenario, but only doubled my western outlook on it.
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