Monthly Archives: July 2016

  • Trishna

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Winterbottom (2011)

    Michael Winterbottom has already directed two cinema adaptations of Thomas Hardy – Jude (1996) and The Claim (2000), the latter based on The Mayor of Casterbridge.  If he hadn’t the idea that this new film is based on Tess of the d’Urbervilles might not even be taken seriously.   This isn’t because Trishna is set in present day India rather than nineteenth-century Wessex but because Winterbottom has chosen to collapse Alec d’Urberville and Angel Clare into a single character.   It’s one thing to see Alec and Angel as two aspects of male tyranny, quite another to dramatise this idea by making them one man.  (Winterbottom also wrote the screenplay this time, whereas Hossein Amini adapted Jude the Obscure and Frank Cottrell Boyce The Mayor of Casterbridge.)    The composite Jay Singh, a wealthy young British Asian, in India managing a hotel owned by his father, has his faults – he’s egocentric and chauvinistic – but, for most of Trishna, he’s more Angel Clare than Alec d’Urberville.   You can’t understand how Trishna (Tess) is going to want or be forced to kill him until, late on in the film, Winterbottom hurriedly changes Jay into a sexually abusive bastard who deserves a kitchen knife in his stomach.

    In an interview in the current issue of the Curzon magazine, Winterbottom talks about the importance in Hardy of social forces and individual personality as determinants of human lives but these influences aren’t held in tension in Trishna.   Although the community the heroine comes from appears to be Christian, you still expect – particularly in view of the plot of the Hardy novel – the Indian caste system to be an imperative in the story.  Yet it’s Trishna’s own character that seems to explain, almost entirely, her fate.  When Jay first takes up with her, he gives Trishna a job in the hotel and arranges hotel management training for her.  Trishna leaves and goes home to her family when she discovers that she’s pregnant with Jay’s child (she then has an abortion) but he makes contact with her again and they go to Mumbai.  There, Jay and a group of friends get involved in making pop videos.  This part of Trishna’s life with him ends when Jay’s father is taken seriously ill.  Jay goes back to London for a while and, when he returns to India, resumes family hotel management, with Trishna once more his employee – and sex object.  Trishna is a talented dancer – Jay first sees her dancing in a Rajasthan temple – but he’s dead against the idea of her pursuing a career as a performer.  When the couple are shown as part of their social group in Mumbai, Winterbottom stresses how different Trishna is from the Western-looking diva-ish star of the films the young men are making – but she’s strikingly different too from all the other Indian girls working in the Mumbai entertainment industry.  They seem puzzled by Jay’s autocratic attitude and Trishna’s acceptance of it.

    Freida Pinto is very well cast to fit Winterbottom’s conception of Trishna but her limitations as an actress reinforce the narrowness of that conception.  Hardy subtitled his novel ‘A Pure Woman’:  he must have known that many contemporary readers would find Tess anything but.   With the lovely and ladylike Pinto in the role and the time and place changed, there’s no friction between Trishna’s behaviour – and how this might be perceived – and her honourable nature.  (And her family in rural India don’t appear to be scandalised that she’s unmarried and pregnant.)   Very few of Trishna’s experiences have any of the emotional extremity of Tess’s.   This is the fault of the screenplay rather than the actress but, when Trishna eventually stabs Jay, we’re as incredulous as she looks to be at what she’s done.  Freida Pinto is the antithesis of feistiness – it’s impossible to believe her passive Trishna capable of such an act of violence.  (In any case, why doesn’t she just walk out of this second hotel job, and a life with Jay, as she did the first?  It isn’t as if Trishna – unlike Tess – has nowhere else to go.)

    Although it’s fundamentally misconceived, Winterbottom seems to have one or two interesting ideas with the Alec-Angel character.  There’s an implication that the British Jay has a more old-fashioned approach to sexual relations with women in India than his male contemporaries there.   It was clear from Rage and Four Lions that Riz Ahmed was a highly talented young actor.   The only real strong point of Trishna is that it gives him the opportunity to go further in a role – even if this turns out to less an opportunity than an impossible task.  Ahmed’s portrait of Jay is socially precise and his acting is emotionally alert.  He also shows great tenacity:  even when Winterbottom suddenly turns his character into a heartless, Kama Sutra-reading sexual tyrant, Ahmed keeps things interesting by suggesting that Jay is getting this way because he’s bored and resentful of his boredom.   The trouble is, this turns the climax – the murder of Jay and the final suicide of Trishna – into a bad joke rather than the heroine’s tragedy. The mostly dark-toned cinematography is by Marcel Zyskind and the swift editing by Mags Arnold.  The music is a mixture of vivid Indian pop tunes by the Bollywood composer Amit Trivedi and vague, important-movie plangency by Shiger Umebayashi.

    11 March 2012

  • Trees Lounge

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steve Buscemi (1996)

    Steve Buscemi played Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogs yet his wardrobe in some of his best roles since, here and in Ghost World, makes me think of him as a different kind of Mr Brown.  This was Buscemi’s first feature as a director (he also wrote the screenplay) and, although he’s made three more since, it’s still the best known.   I can’t fault Wikipedia’s synopsis of Trees Lounge:

     ‘The film follows Tommy Basilio (Buscemi), a 30-year-old alcoholic and fixture at the local bar, Trees Lounge, who begins to float after losing his girlfriend and his job as a mechanic. He continues and amplifies patterns of self-destructive behavior, to include a romantic relationship with a friend’s teenage daughter ([Chloë] Sevigny).’

    The storyline may be slender but Trees Lounge is a nice film.  Buscemi writes excellent naturalistic dialogue (although some of the scenes may well be improvised).  He’s especially good on the structure of arguments:  an exchange between Tommy’s ex-girlfriend Theresa (Elizabeth Bracco) and her boyfriend Rob (Anthony LaPaglia) is a particular highlight.   There are some good one-liners too.  When Tommy is trying to justify his romance with the teenage Debbie to his brother, he makes light of it by saying, ‘We’re just behaving like a couple of high school kids, and the brother replies, ‘She is a high school kid’.   Debbie’s father Jerry (Daniel Baldwin) finds out and beats Tommy up.  Back at Trees Lounge (in spite of the plural there seems to be just the one tree outside), Tommy explains that Jerry drew his own conclusions about the relationship.  ‘Looks like he drew a conclusion on your head,’ observes a man at the bar.

    The atmosphere and texture of people drinking hopelessly are perfectly observed and a fine, eclectic selection of songs, mostly played on the jukebox in the bar, ranges from the Inkspots to incongruous, positive-thinking anthems like ‘Hold Your Head Up’.  Trees Lounge looks like a work in progress – it’s under-dramatised and, because Buscemi has to wind things up more definitely, the ending seems a little forced.  But it’s a real strength of the film that a main reason for its seeming unfinished is that you get so quickly interested in the characters and there isn’t the scope for developing them as much as you’d like.  The whole cast is first rate.  It’s a shame that – except for Buscemi, Samuel L Jackson, Anthony LaPaglia and Chloë Sevigny, who has a lovely, tantalising innocence here – not more has been seen of them (by me anyway) since Trees Lounge.  I particularly enjoyed watching Carol Kane, who looked to have a big career ahead of her in the mid-1970s, and who plays one of the Trees Lounge staff.  Seymour Cassel has a good cameo as Tommy’s Uncle Al, whose ice cream van Tommy takes over driving after Al dies of a heart attack.  There’s also an astonishing looking old man who sits propping up the bar and staring into the camera, the spirit of fully-achieved alcoholism.  (I missed the name of the actor playing him, who, because he looks so remarkable, is actually a little disappointing on the rare occasions the character speaks.)   When the old man is eventually taken into hospital, it’s Tommy who takes over his seat in Trees Lounge.

    11 July 2010

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