Trishna

Trishna is a shining example of the difference between a story and a plot: it has the former but lacks the latter and that's down to Trishna herself: when a character fails to make any real decisions until the penultimate scene, it stops a film kicking off and getting down to business. Trishna does get down to business… but it waits until in the last ten minutes and it's a matter of too little too late by that stage.

Adapted from Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbevilles, Michael Winterbottom (The Killer Inside Me, A Mighty Heart) transplants the English narrative to contemporary India where pretty peasant girl Trishna (Pinto) catches the eye of Jay (Ahmed), the son of a wealthy property developer. When Trishna's father is involved in a car accident, Jay offers her a cosy job in his father's plush hotel to keep money coming into the house. Despite her best efforts to remain chaste, Trishna succumbs to Jay's gentlemanly advances when he saves her from two potential rapists in an alleyway. Falling pregnant, Trishna returns home in disgrace…

It's hard to give a proper synopsis of Trishna because the story is very much of the 'and then this happened and then that happened and then…' and it rambles on with no end in sight until its admittedly unexpected climax. Chances of caring by then may have dissipated, however, because of the wonky pace and that Trishna is just far too passive to carry a film. She never makes a decision, never gets mad, never gets sad. All Freida is asked to do is stand there and be pretty and smile when Ahmed is nice to her. There is nice chemistry between the two, wrapped up in shyness and tradition, to give those scenes a little boost but there is little else happening.

Although he has made some wild changes to the original novel, Winterbottom oddly refuses to pin the principles of contemporary film structure on the story, which stops it from cranking up when it should. This tactic does give Winterbottom the time and room to play around with the classic hero model, though. Jay always wears white and swoops in to save Trishna from two ne'er do wells and later whisks her away from a hard life in factory, but then the director goes about turning all that on its head. Despite Ahmed and Winterbottom's efforts this transition doesn't gel but it's interesting to watch a character the audience has rooted for, to slowly descend into cruelty.

If only it had a stronger plot device to hang its story on Trishna would be a far better experience.