Programme Note: Trishna
Director Michael Winterbottom is well known for his talent for moving easily between genres and styles. Previous to Trishna, the most recent entries on his filmography are the BBC comedy The Trip (2010), and the ultra violent neo-noir The Killer Inside Me (2010). He is also a reader and admirer of Thomas Hardy: Trishna is Winterbottom’s third Hardy adaptation, after the 1996 film Jude, a take on Jude the Obscure, and The Claim (2000), an adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge relocated to a Californian mining town.
From interviews, it is clear that while Winterbottom has a special regard for Hardy, he had not been actively looking to adapt Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Rather, while location scouting in rural Rajasthan on another project, the idea for the adaptation suggested itself in his observations of the country and the similarities he perceived with the context of the novel: ‘I was with some crew from Mumbai, and there was an incredible contrast between the life of the crew from Mumbai and the people of the village, whose lives were just beginning to change with the forces of mechanization, industrialization, urbanization and above all education. That reminded me of Thomas Hardy, and in particular Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Hardy was describing a similar moment in English life.’[1]
That the project began this way feels significant. It implies a director concerned not so much to faithfully rehash the plot of a chosen book, but to engage with the source material at the level of its most important themes. It also suggests that it was always Winterbottom’s intention to use contemporary India not just as a setting in service of Hardy’s story – a convenient setting, one of the few perhaps, where a Victorian story would echo in a meaningful way today: Hardy’s story, the narrative of one village woman, would also be the means through which to explore the surging social currents of a rapidly-changing country.
One of the great strengths of Hardy’s writing, of course, is its evocation of landscape and place; likewise, Trishna evokes its locations vividly. The cast and crew apparently went to great lengths to achieve this effect, spending months in Rajasthan, and specifically Ossian and Jodhpur, talking to locals about the story and how it would make sense in their lives. Many of the actors are non-professionals, the locations real locations; star Freida Pinto was also required to learn the local dialect, Marvadi.[2] Winterbottom has also agreed with interviewers that the film acknowledges – if not quite embraces – the local Bollywood tradition in its melodrama, use of dancing and music (the songs are by Mumbai composer Amit Trivedi).[3]
The film is faithful in its broad outline to Hardy’s source novel – the book’s major conflict, climax and denouement are respected – and there are direct echoes in the film of some smaller details or incidents in the book, for example: Tess is found a job by Alec tending fowls on the d’Urberville estate, Trishna a job tending parakeets at Jay’s father’s hotel; Alec takes Tess on a carriage ride where he drives recklessly and advises Tess to hold on to his waist, Jay advises the same with Trishna as passenger on his scooter as they weave along a crowded street.
There are major changes, however. Tess has two suitors in the novel: the handsome, amoral Alec d’Urberville, son of a wealthy merchant, and Angel Clare, the freethinking son of a respected clergyman. In the film, these characters are combined in Jay, the English-educated son of a wealthy, Indian-born property developer. In Winterbottom’s reading of Tess, Angel and Alec represent, respectively, ‘the spiritual’ and ‘the sensual’; his decision to combine them is explained as an attempt to create a more believable character: ‘I think most people are a combination of both.’[4] A second major change is that in Hardy’s story Tess gives birth to a child, who dies; in Winterbottom’s film Trishna has an abortion, a change made to make the story more believable in the local context (apparently this would be the usual course for an unmarried pregnant girl in rural Rajasthan).[5]
There is also – though it wouldn’t be fair to reveal it here – a significant divergence from the source material in the film’s final minutes, though this is Hardy after all, and it won’t be spoiling it for anyone to say that things don’t end well. Winterbottom is clear on what lies at the heart of Trishna’s tragedy: this is ‘the story of a poor girl falling in love with a rich man and being carried away.’[6] Education has allowed Trishna to look beyond her immediate circumstances at home, and to dream of a better life. But social forces are stronger. Class gives Jay the upper hand: his father’s wealth offers him the luxury of doing what he likes with his life; by contrast, Trishna’s entire family depends on the wage she earns. When differences in their backgrounds become impossible to overcome, this fundamental inequality asserts itself and is compounded by the way a society that still practices arranged marriage treats genders differently: Trishna finds herself at Jay’s mercy.
From the book, Winterbottom’s film retains at the end a crushing sense of a great, undeserved punishment. Trishna’s death feels more significant than a mere death, something more like a sacrifice to the will of a higher power: not the ‘gods’ of a classical tragedy, but all-powerful social forces. As in the book, we are meant to infer a level of social criticism beneath the main story, and the decision to inter-cut Trishna’s final scene with shots of Indian children pledging allegiance to their country is perhaps explained by a wish to hammer home this critique. But the intention may also be to introduce a small note of optimism: Winterbottom has spoken of visiting local schools in Rajasthan on the shoot, and feeling encouraged that girls (and boys) are staying on longer in education. ‘So the situation for women in Rajasthan is changing,’ he says, ‘But when society is changing individuals can suffer.’[7]
Tamara Anderson
Learning & Events Manager, GFT
[1] Production notes, p. 5, accessed at: http://www.bankside-films.com/Trishna.html
[2] Ibid, pp 6 – 17
[3] Ibid, p. 9
[4] Ibid, p. 7
[5] Ibid, p. 8
[6] Ibid, p. 9
[7] Ibid, p. 10
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