Life after Slumdog Millionaire

How do you top your performance after debuting in a huge box-office crossover film like Slumdog Millionaire? "Well, you tell the producers you're not just an exotic girl," said actress Freida Pinto at the New York preview of her latest film, Trishna.

Pinto's leading role as Trishna, in an adaption of Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented by Thomas Hardy published in 1891, proves she is emerging as a serious actress in her own right, clearly not just an exotic girl from India, and someone to be taken seriously as Indian cinema makes yet another attempt to cross over into the Western consciousness. I

just hope she does not burn out and crash like the character she plays in Trishna.

The film has won accolades at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, and the 2011 London Film Festival. "All the social and cultural conditions that Hardy was writing about - urbanization, education, transport, social mobility and so on - are there in an even more extreme form in India," director Michael Winterbottom said at the opening in Toronto.

The film narrates the story of a rural Rajasthani girl who works in a hotel as a waitress after her father falls ill because of an accident. She comes under the spell of rich British-Indian hotelier Jay Singh (Riz Ahmed), who is an heir to a business clan and offers her financial inducements to come work for him. He seems enchanted by her simple yet elegant beauty, while she is taken with his power and the attention showered on her.

They appear to fall in "love" - if that's an appropriate emotion to define what a rural Indian girl might experience when she is working for a powerful boss who showers her with favors and manages to seduce her. Trishna actually willingly elopes with him to Mumbai to get away from her depressive rural life and to experience the thrill of a big city. While living in Mumbai, she flirts with Bollywood dancing and joins a dance troop.

The story appears tenderly fresh as it meanders leisurely through the old country palaces converted into landmark Rajasthani hotels. We get a tourist's-eye view of life in the male-dominated north Indian social and architectural structures, particularly of the divide between the "real India" and the "incredible India".

Leaving behind the life seen from the window of a five-star hotel - the postcard of "Incredible India" seen on buses and train stops in Western capitals - seems inviting or hypnotic, yet turns out to be arid and barren. The "real India" is what Jay discovers when he befriends Trishna and visits her home at the outskirts of town - driving on dirt-baked narrow streets, with heat and dust swirling around him - his muse seems to fade away like a mirage into the congested slums surrounded by the desert.

In getting to know Trishna, Jay encounters a refraction of the Indian feminine unconscious. Cultural psychoanalysts such as Sudhir Kakar have theorized that Indian subjectivity, especially among female clients, is deep and private, less verbal and not as overtly animated as in other cultures, appearing to be docile and passive yet engaged. Much goes unsaid and unspoken, never given a voice or communicated indirectly.

This is certainly true of Trishna's manner of communication, which Pinto likened to the role of "being in an almost silent film". She said her challenge in the role was to absorb and "to withhold" emotions on the screen, not to express them openly.

Indeed, Trishna says very little on the screen, but the tension is felt by the audience nonetheless. The underlying tension in the film plays on the sexual dynamic between Jay and Trishna, which seems frankly open for an Indian audience though commonplace for Western moviegoers. However, within the contemporary context of Rajasthan, it is not clear where it is heading: a marriage, a romance or just a fling?

Deeper into the film, when Jay feels he has complete psychological and sexual control over Trishna, he asks her a question paraphrased from the famed manual of love the Kama Sutra: "A woman can be a maid, a mistress and a concubine - which one are you?"

"All three, I guess," he offers in a narcissistic reply to his own question while Trishna stands in dumb silence looking puzzled and feeling plainly hurt and abused.

The movie then turns from tender to tragic, splattering darkness throughout an otherwise lighthearted story. At the end, the film lays bare the acute sadness of Trishna's life, while making a bold statement about the role of Indian women in contemporary society. The story probably describes the challenges many young girls face in India today as they come of age in rapidly changing times.

If there is a problematic issue with the film, it is that Winterbottom has tried to impose a 19th-century English narrative on to 21st-century India, while relying on the historical knowledge of the exotic tales of the Raj, to capture the psychological and sexual struggles of India women. "It's quite a complex relationship," he said. "In the end it's just a hunch, and you hope it works out." In final analysis, it is a worthy effort, which largely succeeds on the back of Freida Pinto's strong performance.

Another well-known director and producer, Anurag Kashyap, who makes a cameo appearance in the film, seems to have had a hand in shaping the narrative. Pinto said at the New York preview that she was "proud to be associated with the new-wave Indian cinema started by Kashyap". Whether she will be part of Bollywood films is not clear, but does Pinto need Bollywood commercial films after starring in such blockbusters as Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger?

It will be debated by film historians whether Slumdog Millionaire represented the watershed moment for crossover Indian cinema given that it was a British production led by Danny Boyle, director of the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. There is no doubt it launched Freida Pinto as one of its brightest stars into the Hollywood universe. Part and parcel of globalization of filmmaking, Pinto personifies with seeming ease both the "real India" and the "incredible India", while making us all think and muse about the endless possibilities for the future.