Trishna, review - Telegraph Dir: Michael Winterbottom. Starring: Freida Pinto, Riz Ahmed What separates films from exercises in film-making? The gap between the two is hard to define, but much of Michael Winterbottom's work seems to end up getting lodged in it, including this shrewd but stand-offish reworking of Tess of the d'Urbervilles set in present-day India. Winterbottom has form for offbeat Thomas Hardy adaptations: his frostbitten Western, The Claim, was an extended riff on The Mayor of Casterbridge. If anything, the pairing of plot and setting here is even smarter, and you get the impression he knows it. Trishna (Freida Pinto), a peasant woman living in a society that respects neither peasants nor women, leaves her family to work for a smooth-talking hotelier's son called Jay (Riz Ahmed, playing a skin-creepingly passive-aggressive mix of the Angel Clare and Alec d'Urberville characters from Hardy's novel). The pair secretly fall for one another while working at one of Jay's father's resorts, but a move to Mumbai, where they can live together as equals, makes Jay reconsider if equality is what he wants. Both Pinto and Ahmed are on fine form, and share a humid chemistry that gets increasingly clammy as the film progresses, but Winterbottom's air-conditioned direction prevents us from ever feeling the heat. More fascinating is his vision of India: a country where the cities throb with engine noise and drumbeats and the country air trembles with pollen. Nature here is a primitive, almost sentient force: in some ways, we're not so far from Hardy's Wessex after all.