Trishna (MA). Director: Michael Winterbottom. Starring: Freida Pinto, Riz Ahmed. 113 minutes
Did he rape her or not? The first 'phase' of Thomas Hardy's 1891 novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles ends with a sexual encounter between the materially poor, doomed heroine Tess and her well-to-do, sleazy suitor Alec. The scene, veiled in euphemism, is ambiguous, though the sinister tone and Tess' subsequent psychological decline do support the accepted interpretation that the encounter was not consensual.
Prolific UK auteur Michael Winterbottom's somewhat loose adaptation of Tess is even more obscure about the nature of this pivotal event. With Trishna he relocates the story to modern-day India and, intriguingly, snowballs the novel's two male leads (the villainous Alec and the somewhat more sympathetic Angel) into one: Jay (Ahmed), the English-raised son of a wealthy Indian hotel owner and businessman.
Jay is infatuated with Trishna (Pinto) from the first moment he sees her, working at a hotel he is visiting with his yobbish friends. He later goes to her house and observes her family's financial hardship (her father was recently incapacitated in a car accident). Playing saviour, he gets her a job at one of his father's hotels, and begins trying to woo her. He does all this with the dispassionate admiration of one seeking to purchase a new leather sofa.
They do have sex, but whether or not the encounter was consensual, Winterbottom is not inclined to tell us outright; the camera cuts away. Certainly the power imbalance in the relationship makes such an encounter ethically dubious even if it was not strictly rape. This could account for Trishna's traumatised escape for a time back to her family. In any case, the event has repercussions that unfold throughout the rest of the film.
In Hardy's novel, Tess is led from this point into tragedy, by desperation and by the weight of societal and parental expectations. Trishna experiences these things too, but by comparison she seems to have greater control of her destiny. The question of the rape, then, remains a problem, as it has some bearing on the degree of sympathy we ultimately feel for her. Was this a path she chose, or was it forced upon her?
Certainly if it was rape, it is inconceivable that she later becomes Jay's willing lover. He seduces her with a promise of a big-city life in Mumbai, and, incongruously, they appear to be happy for a while. Jay though is