After a long festival run beginning at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall and stops ranging from tests in Abu Dhabi, Tokyo, London, Rome, Hong Kong and Provincetown here in the U.S. Michael Winterbottom's India-set Trishna will open theatrically beginning this Friday. The Cinema Society hosted an event in New York kicking off its run with a screening and party Tuesday night.
Michael Winterbottom, one of the most fascinating and idiosyncratic filmmakers of our age, makes so many movies that some of them creep into festivals very quietly and, just as quietly, creep out, never to be seen again. That wasn't the case with The Trip, for my money one of the most intriguing pictures of 2011, a woolly exploration of middle-aged angst that featured Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (as themselves) bickering and trading Sean Connery impersonations as they made their way through the English countryside. But two years before that, in 2008, Winterbottom brought a picture called Genova to the Toronto International Film Festival. The picture, a mildly engaging drama in which Colin Firth plays a father who moves his family to Italy after the death of their mother, never got a U.S. release, fading like the worn face of a stone saint on a medieval church. Fortunately, Winterbottom’s latest, Trishna, a retelling of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles set in contemporary India, hasn’t met the same fate. And though it’s a bit of an oddity, it’s an affecting curio suitable for both Hardy enthusiasts and Winterbottom fans alike.
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