Director: Michael Winterbottom
Language: English
For his third Thomas Hardy adaptation (after "Jude" and "The Claim"), director Michael Winterbottom reimagines "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" in modern-day Rajasthan, where a privileged British-born Asian on holiday (Riz Ahmed) becomes besotted with a rickshaw driver's daughter (Freida Pinto), taking her on as a maid with the eventual aim of seducing her. The Bollywood approach works surprisingly well, but canning the Tess-Angel-Alec triangle of the novel and merging the two very different men into one character was probably not the best idea.
