Directed by Michael Winterbottom
(R)
**
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Director Michael Winterbottom constantly tries new things and, almost always, produces interesting results, said Stephanie Zacharek in Movieline.com. His recent credits include a comedic road trip (The Trip) and an earnest drama (A Mighty Heart), but Trishna is “a bit of an oddity.” He uses Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles as inspiration, but changes the location from 19th-century England to modern-day India for the story of a young woman saved from poverty by her seemingly sweet lover, who then degrades her. Hardy’s story “migrates easily” to India, “where class and boundaries seem to shift every second,” said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post. And Winterbottom’s “signature fluid filming style” captures the country’s “poetry and poverty with equal enthusiasm.” The problems are Freida Pinto as Trishna and Riz Ahmed as her lover, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. This role keeps the “strikingly beautiful” actress “submissive and inexpressive.” Ahmed is similarly vacant, and “his transformation from benign boyfriend to vile satyr is as mysterious to us as it is to poor Trishna.”
