I always admired the way director Michael Winterbottom brought to life the living, breathing 'feel' of the story he was telling in "In This World", a 2002 drama about a plight from one end of Europe to the other; filling the frame with a sudden cut to a television broadcast and somehow managing to maintain a real air of the other-worldly with slow-burning electronic music and moving compositions. He brings a similar aesthetic to "Trishna", instilling it with dream-like music and seemingly needless cutaways to shots of bustling cities, vistas and the nature of the sub-continent.
Stripped bare, the film is not really depicting anything especially original - it is a love story and a tragedy; a two-hander conveying a brooding infatuation and how somebody else copes with it. A lesser film might have just depicted one side of the story, tossed in a finale probably involving a chase and a 'fatal blow', and would almost certainly have done it all in a fashion less ambitious than what Winterbottom does here.
We begin in the winter of a holiday three Britain-based lads are having in India with a fourth chap called Jay (Riz Ahmed) who, while certainly has a physical connection to the UK, is now living in India and is racially Indian. The four of them have been enjoying themselves, chiefly using the experience to try and pull a lot of women - their introduction sees them hare past the camera in a 4x4 which is blaring out rock music with a misogynist undertone as a camel, perhaps designed to epitomise a more traditional form of transportation, limps along in the background in the other direction.
Once the holiday ends and the three head back to Britain, Jay remains and carries on working at his affluent father's hotel in Jaipur, where he has goaded the young eponymous Trishna (Freida Pinto) into working there two having met her at a different hotel during the holiday. The film will come to revolve around both of these characters in equal measure, but Winterbottom keeps his cards mightily close to his chest throughout; where Jay dominates the opening act, and we are invited to see the piece as a project about someone perhaps learning to loosen attitudes and embrace monogamy, Trishna is probably provided with a meatier personality: her father is injured and the move to the big city, away from her humble rural home, will earn the big-money to pay for that. The character arc of shifting somebody away from this kind of locality and to the other one is, again, something more synonymous with protagonists and more typical with mythic story-telling.
And yet, she is remarkably passive for a protagonist - her role in the film as a waitress helpfully, perhaps even deliberately, reinforces this; Jay makes all the conversation, calls most of the shots as it is he who is most familiar with the Jaipur surroundings. The film initiates a kind of love story, toying with us and placing us into a false domain whereby Trishna appears to change her mind having initially rejected Jay's initial advances upon being rescued from a probable mugging. We are provided with scenes such as the one whereby one teaches the other how to whistle, which in a lesser film might have had us crossing our arms and exhaling in its awkward simplicity.
But the film is not as one-dimensional as that. It seems to lose faith in Jay as a lead in the second act, shifting focus over to Pinto's character, who gradually puts all the pieces together just as the audience is invited to: Jay is so very spoiled by his father, and has a history of getting everything he wants anyway; we learn that he has slept with a number of other female employees at the hotel, but is this friendship with Trishna any different, and is his desire to drop his liberal attitudes for something potentially resembling monogamy genuine? Certainly, the way Jay's own father places his hands on the face of Trishna early in their meeting may just be an eccentric, friendly way of making first-contact, or is it something seamier in the wider context of life at this place?
I only learnt through research after the fact that the film is based on a novel by Thomas Hardy entitled 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' and that another male character has been removed entirely for this filmic adaptation. As a consequence, Winterbottom is working within confines even tighter than I first realised and grumblings on how Jay seems to slide from being one person into another a little too easily might seem misplaced given Ahmed has been granted the unenviable task of essentially depicting both people. Problems with this or anything else aside, "Trishna" is a meaty two-handed tale of love; loss and tragedy.
Stripped bare, the film is not really depicting anything especially original - it is a love story and a tragedy; a two-hander conveying a brooding infatuation and how somebody else copes with it. A lesser film might have just depicted one side of the story, tossed in a finale probably involving a chase and a 'fatal blow', and would almost certainly have done it all in a fashion less ambitious than what Winterbottom does here.
We begin in the winter of a holiday three Britain-based lads are having in India with a fourth chap called Jay (Riz Ahmed) who, while certainly has a physical connection to the UK, is now living in India and is racially Indian. The four of them have been enjoying themselves, chiefly using the experience to try and pull a lot of women - their introduction sees them hare past the camera in a 4x4 which is blaring out rock music with a misogynist undertone as a camel, perhaps designed to epitomise a more traditional form of transportation, limps along in the background in the other direction.
Once the holiday ends and the three head back to Britain, Jay remains and carries on working at his affluent father's hotel in Jaipur, where he has goaded the young eponymous Trishna (Freida Pinto) into working there two having met her at a different hotel during the holiday. The film will come to revolve around both of these characters in equal measure, but Winterbottom keeps his cards mightily close to his chest throughout; where Jay dominates the opening act, and we are invited to see the piece as a project about someone perhaps learning to loosen attitudes and embrace monogamy, Trishna is probably provided with a meatier personality: her father is injured and the move to the big city, away from her humble rural home, will earn the big-money to pay for that. The character arc of shifting somebody away from this kind of locality and to the other one is, again, something more synonymous with protagonists and more typical with mythic story-telling.
And yet, she is remarkably passive for a protagonist - her role in the film as a waitress helpfully, perhaps even deliberately, reinforces this; Jay makes all the conversation, calls most of the shots as it is he who is most familiar with the Jaipur surroundings. The film initiates a kind of love story, toying with us and placing us into a false domain whereby Trishna appears to change her mind having initially rejected Jay's initial advances upon being rescued from a probable mugging. We are provided with scenes such as the one whereby one teaches the other how to whistle, which in a lesser film might have had us crossing our arms and exhaling in its awkward simplicity.
But the film is not as one-dimensional as that. It seems to lose faith in Jay as a lead in the second act, shifting focus over to Pinto's character, who gradually puts all the pieces together just as the audience is invited to: Jay is so very spoiled by his father, and has a history of getting everything he wants anyway; we learn that he has slept with a number of other female employees at the hotel, but is this friendship with Trishna any different, and is his desire to drop his liberal attitudes for something potentially resembling monogamy genuine? Certainly, the way Jay's own father places his hands on the face of Trishna early in their meeting may just be an eccentric, friendly way of making first-contact, or is it something seamier in the wider context of life at this place?
I only learnt through research after the fact that the film is based on a novel by Thomas Hardy entitled 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' and that another male character has been removed entirely for this filmic adaptation. As a consequence, Winterbottom is working within confines even tighter than I first realised and grumblings on how Jay seems to slide from being one person into another a little too easily might seem misplaced given Ahmed has been granted the unenviable task of essentially depicting both people. Problems with this or anything else aside, "Trishna" is a meaty two-handed tale of love; loss and tragedy.