2011 British film
Trishna is a 2011 drama film, written and directed by Michael Winterbottom, and starring Freida Pinto and Riz Ahmed. A British-Swedish-Indian co-production, it is an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's 1891 novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles. It is Winterbottom's third Hardy adaptation, after Jude and The Claim. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September 2011, and after some further festival appearances it saw its first cinema release in the United Kingdom and Ireland on 9 March 2012.[2]
Plot
Wealthy British businessman Jay Singh comes to Rajasthan, India, to work in his father's hotel business. He sees a woman named Trishna dancing at a hotel and becomes attracted to her.
After an accident destroys her father's Jeep and leaves her family without the means to support themselves, Trishna, approached with an offer of employment from Jay, accepts and begins to work for him.
Jay gives Trishna special treatment and gifts. Overwhelmed by his generosity and his position of power, she does not know how to respond. After a night out with friends, Jay tracks her down and rescues her from two men harassing her on the street. Instead of taking her back to the servant quarters of the hotel, he stops in a wooded area and makes an advance. He eventually rapes Trishna, who returns from their encounter crying.[3] She flees the next morning back to her family. An unwanted pregnancy results, and Trishna has an abortion, hoping to continue in her family as if she had never left. However, her father's shame over her pregnancy and the family's need for income means that she is sent to serve her bed-bound aunt and work in the small factory her uncle runs. Jay tracks her down again and seems surprised that she has not tried to contact him; viewing the rape as a consensual sexual experience. He offers her the opportunity to be his girlfriend in Mumbai, and Trishna chooses to go with him, escaping the drudgery of factory work.
In Mumbai, Trishna accompanies Jay to events relating to the film industry, in which he is interested in investing as a producer. She begins dance classes, and is good, but Jay refuses to allow her to pursue dancing as a career. He convinces Trishna that she does not want to be a dancer and that she is to stay at his side. At their home, he is domineering and treats her subserviently, making her handle all domestic chores. One day, Jay has to leave for England, where his father is in hospital after having a stroke. Shocked by the brush with mortality, Jay feels closer to Trishna, and confesses having slept with two other women before she moved in with him. Feeling a level of trust with Jay, Trishna tells him about her pregnancy and abortion. Jay gets progresively angry about her keeping that secret from him. He abandons Trishna and stops paying the lease on their apartment. Trishna eventually moves in with some friends from dance class. Jay later returns to meet her, pretending it was all a misunderstanding and blaming her from not telling him that the unpaid lease. Meanwhile, a dance coordinator informs Trish that, to begin a career as a dancer, she would need 30,000 rupees on a special card. The coordinator offers to loan her. Stuck between going into debt with a stranger or Jay, she chooses to return to Jay. His father's state means he has to return to the hotel in Rajasthan. He offers her a job there and promises to maintain their relationship in secret.
Jay treats her as a servant in public, which for him adds some titillating thrill to their sexual encounters. Jay's desire for control becomes ever more overt. He starts imagining himself as the raja of that hotel that was once a castle, taking up residence in the rooms the ruler had once occupied. After months of abuse, a distraught Trishna takes a kitchen knife while Jay is sleeping and stabs him to death.
She escapes and returns to her family's village, where her mother and younger siblings receive her happily. However, her father continues to treat her coldly. Despite appearing to have a normal life, Trishna eventually commits suicide by stabbing herself with the same knife used to kill Jay.
Production
The film was produced by Winterbottom's production company Revolution Films in co-production with Film i Väst and Bob Film Sweden, and in association with Anurag Kashyap Films.[4] It received financial support from the UK Film Council and the Swedish Film Institute.[4] Filming took place in Jaipur, Rajasthan.[5]
Reception
Trishna received mixed reviews. David Gritten in the Daily Telegraph wrote that, "The film looks splendid, and its incisive score by Shigeru Umebayashi, with a lovely mournful waltz theme, propels the story all the way to its unhappy climax. Yet Trishna feels faintly unsatisfying, leaving a sense of opportunities missed and details not quite thought through."[6] Film critic Roger Ebert wrote "Winterbottom is a director who never repeats himself, films all over the world, and in "Trishna," effortlessly embeds his story in modern India". Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal thought that the film was "spectacular visually, though awfully somber dramatically". As of June 2020[update], the film holds a 63% approval rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, based on 92 reviews with an average rating of 6.07/10.[7] For the academic reception of Trishna, see Mendes (2016).[8]
The film was nominated for Best Film at the London Film Festival, for Tokyo Grand Prix at the Tokyo International Film Festival, and for Politiken's Audience Award at CPH:PIX in Copenhagen.[9]
