Trishna (2011 film)

Trishna
Official release poster of Trishna
Directed by	Michael Winterbottom
Produced by	Sunil Bohra Melissa Parmenter Michael Winterbottom
Screenplay by	Michael Winterbottom
Based on	Tess of the d'Urbervilles  by Thomas Hardy
Starring	Freida Pinto Riz Ahmed
Music by	Amit Trivedi Shigeru Umebayashi
Cinematography	Marcel Zyskind
Editing by	Mags Arnold
Studio	Revolution Films Ballet Boyz Productions
Release dates	9 September 2011 (2011-09-09) (Toronto Film Festival) 3 September 2012 (2012-09-03) (United Kingdom)
Running time	108 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English Hindi
Box office	$240,381[1]

Trishna is a 2011 British drama film directed by Michael Winterbottom, starring Freida Pinto and Riz Ahmed. The story is an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles. It is Winterbottom's third Hardy adaptation, after Jude and The Claim. It was shot in Jaipur and Mumbai, India, in early 2011.^[2] It premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September.^[3]

Plot

Based on Thomas Hardy's classic novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Trishna tells the story of a woman whose life is destroyed by the restrictions of social status, complications of love and life, and her development as an individual. Set in contemporary Rajasthan, Trishna (Freida Pinto) meets a wealthy British businessman, Jay Singh (Riz Ahmed), who has come to India to work in his father's hotel business. He sees her dancing at a hotel, and is attracted to her beauty and innocence.

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 her work beneath him.

Jay develops feelings for Trishna, expressing them through special treatment and gifts. She is overwhelmed by his generosity and his position of power, and does not know how to respond. After a night out with friends, Jay tracks her down and rescues her from the unwanted attentions of two men on the street. However, instead of taking her back to the servant quarters of the hotel, he takes her to a forest and it is implied that she is raped as she comes back from their encounter crying. She flees the next morning back to her family. An unwanted pregnancy results from the rape, and Trisha has an abortion, hoping to put the entire episode behind her and continue in her family as if she'd never left. However, her father's shame at her pregnancy and the family's need for income means that she is sent to work for her aunt and uncle, serving her bed-bound aunt and also working in the small factory her uncle runs. To her dismay, Jay tracks her down again and seems surprised that she has not tried to contact him and seems to be unaware of Trishna's view on the encounter. He offers her the opportunity to be his live-in girlfriend in Mumbai, and Trishna chooses to go with him, rather than stay as a drudge and factory worker, knowing she is selling her body for the opportunity to start life again in the city.

In Bombay, Trishna gets to accompany Jay to events relating to the film industry, in which he is interested in investing as a producer. She begins dance classes, and is strikingly good, but Jay refuses to allow her to pursue dancing as a career. He tries to convince her (and seems to succeed) that she does not want to be a dancer and that she is to stay at his side. Their relationship has settled into an affectionate arrangement when Jay suddenly has to leave for England, where his father is in hospital after having a stroke. Shocked by the brush with mortality, Jay feels ever closer to Trishna, and confesses having had flings with several other women in their social circles before she moved to Mumbai. Feeling a level of trust with her patron/boyfriend, Trishna confesses to Jay that after their first sexual encounter, she became pregnant and had an abortion. He reacts by asking her why she didn't think he had a right to know and gets progressively mad when he thinks of all the times she could have told him about it. With difficulties at their highest, Jay abandons Trishna and stops paying the lease on their apartment. Trishna – having heard nothing from Jay –- joins some of her friends from dance class in their apartment. To her surprise Jay returns to meet her and apologises for his callous behavior, though he pretends it was all a misunderstanding and that she should have told him that the lease was not being paid. Meanwhile, she has learned from a rather greasy dance coordinator, that to begin a career as a dancer, she'd have to spend 30,000 rupees on a special card, money the dance co-ordinator offers to loan her. Stuck between going into debt with a stranger and the known quantity of Jay, she chooses to return to Jay. His father's incapacitated state means Jay has to leave the city and go back to the idyllic hotel in Rajasthan. He offers her a job at his hotel where he promises to maintain their relationship in secret.

Initially all is well. Jay must treat her as a servant in public, which adds some titillating thrill to their encounters for him. But Jay's boredom, frustration, and return to an extremely dominant position exacerbates the power dynamic that already plagued their supposedly love-based relationship. Jay's desire for control becomes ever more overt. He begins to imagine himself as the raja of this hotel that was once a castle, taking up residence in the rooms the ruler had once occupied. He forces her to perform sexual acts and constantly abuses her. And on one such occasion brutally rapes her. Trishna, her spirit destroyed and her hopes for opportunity in tatters, takes a kitchen knife and, while Jay is sleeping, stabs him to death with three stabs while he looks at her in surprise.

Trishna escapes and returns to the village with her family, where at first she appears to be leading a normal life, but in the tragic climax Trishna finds an isolated spot and commits suicide by stabbing herself with the same kitchen knife used to kill Jay. This is where the story ends.

Cast

• Freida Pinto as Trishna
• Riz Ahmed as Jay
• Anurag Kashyap as Himself
• Roshan Seth as Jay's father
• Amit Trivedi as himself
• Huma Qureshi Special appearance in song "Maintenance"
• Kalki Koechlin as Herself
• Neet Mohan as Sandeep
• Harish Khanna as Vijay
• Aakash Dahiya as Avit
• Meeta Vashisht as Trishna's mother

Production

The film was produced by Revolution Films and Ballet Boyz Productions, with financial support from Film i Väst and the UK Film Council. Filming took place in Jaipur, Rajasthan from 26 February 2011 and lasted six weeks.^[4]

Release

Critical reception

Trishna opened to a mostly positive response. It has a 67% score on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. 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". It was nominated for Best Film at the London Film Festival and Tokyo Grand Prix at the Tokyo International Film Festival.^[5]

Box office

The film has earned $240,381 worldwide according to Box Office Mojo as of August 2012.

References

External links

• Trishna at the Internet Movie Database