If "Tess" Ate Vindaloo...

....it would be Trishna, Michael Winterbottom's Indian take on Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, opening in theaters today. Freida Pinto is a humble country girl, the daughter of an auto rickshaw owner, who finds herself tangled up in tragedy after encountering the spoiled son of a wealthy hotelier. 

Thomas Hardy has a way of killing me softly, as Roberta Flack might say, and this novel is my favorite of his, aching and acute, to the point where I want to scream and fling the book across the room when I reach the conclusion. Incidentally, it's not Winterbottom's first take on Hardy's work. He directed the gut-wrenching Jude (Jude the Obscure) and The Claim (i.e. The Mayor of Casterbridge set in the American Gold Rush).

P.S. Winterbottom also gave us the offbeat Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which was an interesting film-within-a-film attempt at showing why Laurence Sterne's novel is so tough to adapt for film.