Director: Michael Winterbottom
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is transplanted to modern day India, where Trishna (Freida Pinto) comes from a poor working family whose livelihood is threatened when she and her father are involved in an accident. A wealthy admirer (Riz Ahmed) gets her a job at his father’s luxury Jaipur hotel, where he uses his position of power to seduce her. Hardy’s frankly bonkers tale is loosely adapted and updated, but arrives populated with dull characters with little spark between them to make us care about what their fates will be. There’s no hint of dramatic momentum or interesting development, with the normally reliable Michael Winterbottom seeming to have forgotten that drama is supposed to have conflict and obstacles and characterisation, and the result is a safe, trite and pointless chore.
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