ChikPapa Very disappointed :(

Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Yash Wade Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

SnoopyStyle Jay Singh (Riz Ahmed) is a westernized Indian. He and his friends travel out into rural Rajasthan and stays at a local hotel. He is taken with villager Trishna (Freida Pinto) performing at the hotel. She and her father are injured in a car accident. Her father can't work and they struggle with the debt. Jay offers her a job at his family's hotel outside of Jaipur. Jay falls deeper in love and one night, he does something which changes everything.Director Michael Winterbottom brings out a beauty from the setting and Freida Pinto is a large part of that. The story lacks a focus that would raise its inherit social commentary and tension. First I would make Jay's hotel much more modern. It needs to differentiate from Trishna's home town. Then there is that night. It's filmed with so much ambiguity that it doesn't really make the point hard enough. This is an adaptation of the classic Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and there is a good parallel between the two social worlds. This movie should work a lot better than this.

jcnsoflorida About halfway through the film, why does rich boyfriend start behaving so badly? I've pondered this and come to a simple answer: Because he can. He's not merely financially comfortable, he's so wealthy that his freedom is practically unbounded and he can get away with just about anything. Society (including the legal system) imposes very few limits on BF's conduct. His world-weary father seems nice to Trishna, but in a sort of condescending, noblesse oblige way. There's certainly no requirement that he be nice to her.Unfortunately I don't think writer-director Winterbottom dramatizes any of this particularly well. During the 2nd half of the film, BF's badness is as inexplicable to us as it is to Trishna.Nevertheless, I give the film credit for the romantic and fun first half. The music is wonderful, Trishna and BF are gorgeous (really) and the photography of India is better than a lot of western directors achieve.

miss_lady_ice-853-608700 Tess of The D'Urbervilles is a brilliant novel, with a wealth of material for any director to get their teeth into. Setting the story in modern-day India was a really good idea- when Michael Winterbottom put his twist on scenes from the novel, they worked well and gave an insight into what the film could have been.The confusing and frustrating element of this film for anybody who's read the novel is that at the heart of the book is a brilliant love triangle. Tess is caught in the clutches of callous playboy Alec D'Urberville but hopes to find salvation in her new lover, the godlike Angel Clare- however, both men fail her. For some inexplicable reason, Winterbottom chooses to merge Angel and Alec together, into the character of Jay, a British-Indian, so we have a good guy who inexplicably turns bad. Even a good actor would struggle to pull this off but Riz Ahmed, who has to be one of the worst actors I've ever seen, fails completely. Winterbottom seems to have asked him to improvise parts in order to create a naturalistic feel. Yes, they tried to do Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, a tragedy in the Greek style or at the very least a nineteenth century melodrama, in a realistic style. What are we going to have next, naturalistic Hamlet? "Yeah, Hamlet, I'm sorry about murdering your father but I really fancied your mother. You know how it is." I'm not familiar with Winterbottom's work but I vaguely recalled that it was a bit pornographic. An hour or so into the film, I was wondering when the smut would come. And then I saw Jay flicking through a copy of-you guessed it, the Karma Sutra. At this point, a couple actually walked out of the cinema, and the remaining audience were either shocked, amused, horrified or a mixture of all three. Trishna's descent into sex object is upsetting but it is so predictably done that the tragedy is lost.As for the leading lady, Frieda Pinto is very good as the passive heroine. As Roman Polanski did in the 1978 adaptation of the novel, Winterbottom lingers on Pinto's beauty, and the beauty and vibrancy of India. There is perhaps a little too much lingering- there is not much dialogue, and when there is dialogue, it is banal.It's interesting to see what they did with the story and Pinto is very watchable but this is very much a wasted opportunity. It is pretty hard to make Tess lacklustre, but Winterbottom has managed it. The fact that he's done two other films based on Thomas Hardy novels is worrying.

Fatimahwoz This film had tremendous potential and a kicking story line. Sadly it was ruined by the poor direction and excessive focus on irrelevant detail which added no true value to the movie. Even though set in the right location and a good attempt to grasp the culture and traditions of a dated village in India,Freida Pinto's fluent English contradicted her character representation. Similarly, Riz Ahmed'a acting was shockingly bad given his performance in Four Lions. He failed to really relate to the character and the level of darkness which was clearly being represented by Jay in the movie was played without flair and a certain discomfort by Ahmed. Both stars failed to live up to their previous performances and to generally portray any chemistry on screen. The film itself lacked substance in the message it sent and the story it told. Poorly directed and an epic failure in representing Asian talent in English Cinema.