FILM
REVIEW Life after Slumdog
Millionaire Trishna
directed by Michael Winterbottom
Reviewed by Dinesh Sharma
How do
you top your performance after debuting in a huge
box-office crossover film like Slumdog
Millionaire? "Well, you tell the producers
you're not just an exotic girl," said actress
Freida Pinto at the New York preview of her latest
film, Trishna.
Pinto's leading role
as Trishna, in an adaption of Tess of the
d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully
Presented by Thomas Hardy published in 1891,
proves she is emerging as a serious actress in her
own right, clearly not just an exotic girl from
India, and someone to be taken seriously as Indian
cinema makes yet another attempt to cross over
into the Western consciousness. I
just hope she does not
burn out and crash like the character she plays in
Trishna.
The film has won accolades
at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, the 2011
Toronto International Film Festival, and the 2011
London Film Festival. "All the social and cultural
conditions that Hardy was writing about -
urbanization, education, transport, social
mobility and so on - are there in an even more
extreme form in India," director Michael
Winterbottom said at the opening in Toronto.
The film narrates the story of a rural
Rajasthani girl who works in a hotel as a waitress
after her father falls ill because of an accident.
She comes under the spell of rich British-Indian
hotelier Jay Singh (Riz Ahmed), who is an heir to
a business clan and offers her financial
inducements to come work for him. He seems
enchanted by her simple yet elegant beauty, while
she is taken with his power and the attention
showered on her.
They appear to fall in
"love" - if that's an appropriate emotion to
define what a rural Indian girl might experience
when she is working for a powerful boss who
showers her with favors and manages to seduce her.
Trishna actually willingly elopes with him to
Mumbai to get away from her depressive rural life
and to experience the thrill of a big city. While
living in Mumbai, she flirts with Bollywood
dancing and joins a dance troop.
The story
appears tenderly fresh as it meanders leisurely
through the old country palaces converted into
landmark Rajasthani hotels. We get a tourist's-eye
view of life in the male-dominated north Indian
social and architectural structures, particularly
of the divide between the "real India" and the
"incredible India".
Leaving behind the
life seen from the window of a five-star hotel -
the postcard of "Incredible India" seen on buses
and train stops in Western capitals - seems
inviting or hypnotic, yet turns out to be arid and
barren. The "real India" is what Jay discovers
when he befriends Trishna and visits her home at
the outskirts of town - driving on dirt-baked
narrow streets, with heat and dust swirling around
him - his muse seems to fade away like a mirage
into the congested slums surrounded by the desert.
In getting to know Trishna, Jay encounters
a refraction of the Indian feminine unconscious.
Cultural psychoanalysts such as Sudhir Kakar have
theorized that Indian subjectivity, especially
among female clients, is deep and private, less
verbal and not as overtly animated as in other
cultures, appearing to be docile and passive yet
engaged. Much goes unsaid and unspoken, never
given a voice or communicated indirectly.
This is certainly true of Trishna's manner
of communication, which Pinto likened to the role
of "being in an almost silent film". She said her
challenge in the role was to absorb and "to
withhold" emotions on the screen, not to express
them openly.
Indeed, Trishna says very
little on the screen, but the tension is felt by
the audience nonetheless. The underlying tension
in the film plays on the sexual dynamic between
Jay and Trishna, which seems frankly open for an
Indian audience though commonplace for Western
moviegoers. However, within the contemporary
context of Rajasthan, it is not clear where it is
heading: a marriage, a romance or just a fling?
Deeper into the film, when Jay feels he
has complete psychological and sexual control over
Trishna, he asks her a question paraphrased from
the famed manual of love the Kama Sutra: "A woman
can be a maid, a mistress and a concubine - which
one are you?"
"All three, I guess," he
offers in a narcissistic reply to his own question
while Trishna stands in dumb silence looking
puzzled and feeling plainly hurt and abused.
The movie then turns from tender to
tragic, splattering darkness throughout an
otherwise lighthearted story. At the end, the film
lays bare the acute sadness of Trishna's life,
while making a bold statement about the role of
Indian women in contemporary society. The story
probably describes the challenges many young girls
face in India today as they come of age in rapidly
changing times.
If there is a problematic
issue with the film, it is that Winterbottom has
tried to impose a 19th-century English narrative
on to 21st-century India, while relying on the
historical knowledge of the exotic tales of the
Raj, to capture the psychological and sexual
struggles of India women. "It's quite a complex
relationship," he said. "In the end it's just a
hunch, and you hope it works out." In final
analysis, it is a worthy effort, which largely
succeeds on the back of Freida Pinto's strong
performance.
Another well-known director
and producer, Anurag Kashyap, who makes a cameo
appearance in the film, seems to have had a hand
in shaping the narrative. Pinto said at the New
York preview that she was "proud to be associated
with the new-wave Indian cinema started by
Kashyap". Whether she will be part of Bollywood
films is not clear, but does Pinto need Bollywood
commercial films after starring in such
blockbusters as Rise of the Planet of the
Apes and Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall
Dark Stranger?
It will be debated by
film historians whether Slumdog Millionaire
represented the watershed moment for crossover
Indian cinema given that it was a British
production led by Danny Boyle, director of the
opening ceremony of the London Olympics. There is
no doubt it launched Freida Pinto as one of its
brightest stars into the Hollywood universe. Part
and parcel of globalization of filmmaking, Pinto
personifies with seeming ease both the "real
India" and the "incredible India", while making us
all think and muse about the endless possibilities
for the future.
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