It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

No spoilers here, just the tone of this movie which is unbelievable and fake. I'm going back to good ol' Bollywood movies clear of pretension and illusions of drama. We ingested this movie during the #metoo era in 2017. It reads like a plantation story, starting with bunch of culturally illiterate hurrah henrys on a trip in India, enjoying thier 1% status. The main dude is suppose to be half Indian, but doesn't speak or understand his Indian father's language and gets this - is not even aware of basic basic basic things about rural India. So why didn't they put a regular white english boy in the role? An wack attempt to avoid any colonial 'massa' plantation comparisons.This makes for pathetic unbelievable dialog and actions, As a third world boy, I can tell you the first thing you learn to do when you visit the motherlands is to switch codes and not talk to locals like their your boy from back home. This dude also rapes the girl. It's RAPE! Some of us watching (the westerners) couldn't get their heads around this part, which it what the film is counting on (to it's targeted audience). We discussed it and it was explained that, yes today in rural traditional parts of the world women can be raped but not know it. It comes from being subservient and knowing your place (like a good plantation girl or boy). After that incident, the film bores on continuously with lines like 'I'm going to tell my father about us' (really dude? I mean really?).This could and should have stuck to the ol' British kitchen sink film formalua where upperclass twat slumps it in his father's factory by messing with the hot factory hand girl working there. Sure it's been done before but it would better than this boring unbelieveble nonsense. It did remind us of those loser English Language Tutors who go to China, Malaysia teaching and seducing traditional country girls and getting away with the kind of abuse they could never do at home until of course they get their asses kicked by her family. Now that's a story I'd like see on film.

To claim that TRISHNA is an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' is really stretching the imagination. This is an engrossing film about caste differences in India: the screenwriters are not mentioned - only the fact that director Michael Winterbottom based his story on Hardy's famous novel seems to be more of a PR draw than reality. But the film is well acted and the aromas and atmospheres of India are well captured.TRISHNA reveals the life of one woman whose life is destroyed by a combination of love and circumstances. Set in contemporary Rajasthan, Trishna (Freida Pinto, beautiful and sensitive) meets a wealthy young British businessman Jay Singh (Riz Ahmed, inordinately handsome and polished) who has come to India to work in his father's hotel business. After an accident destroys her father's Jeep, Trishna goes to work for Jay, and they fall in love. But despite their feelings for each other, they cannot escape the conflicting pressures of a rural society which is changing rapidly through industrialization, urbanization and, above all, education. Trishna's tragedy is that she is torn between the traditions of her family life and the dreams and ambitions that her education has given her: the sexual double standard to which Tess falls victim despite being a truly good woman makes her despised by society after losing her virginity before marriage. Trishna has choices after she receives an education, but she instead chooses to follow her passion for Jay. Jay truly loves Trishna but his social class demands that he keep Trishna as an employee, making his physical love affair with her a private matter due to the rules of the caste system. Jay does not seem to be a villain here and Trishna is not a victim: these two facts make the ending a bit over the top and unnecessary. A more intelligent script could have made this a first class film.Freida Pinto and Riz Ahmed are fascinating to observe as they work through the confines of love in a world that does not condone their union. The other characters in the cast are excellent - especially Roshan Seth as Jay's father. In setting the story in contemporary India the director seems to have decided it was important to include cellphones and Bollywood dancing rehearsals and filmmaking to provide spice. But in the end it is the fine acting by Pinto and Ahmed that make this film work. Grady Harp

Trishna is a love story based on the Thomas Hardy novel Tess of the D'urbervilles. I haven't read it or seen the Polanski adaptation with Nastassia Kinski. Freida Pinto is the Tess character this time round, and she is breathtakingly beautiful; so casting is not the problem here. The story is so fractured, and the editing so poor, that I don't know what the filmmakers were going for.It begins with a group of bored upper class Indians on a balcony discussing the best cities to party in. They get in a Jeep and drive recklessly around like a bunch of college frat boys. They visit an ancient temple where Jay; the leader of the pack, spots the stunning Trishna. He gets up to dance with her and later drops her off at the lower class families home. The next day, Trishna is riding on the back of her father's truck to deliver produce when they crash into another vehicle and her dad is so badly injured that he cannot work. Jay comes to the rescue by offering Trishna a job at his father's big resort hotel. She works as a servant and he eventually has an encounter with her. The next morning she goes back home very quietly. Three months of vomiting and a visit to a doctor confirm a pregnancy which is terminated. Jay reappears, and a few dance numbers are presented in between for no apparent reason. Trishna ends up at another of Jay's dad's hotels working once again as a servant. They also have a secret sexual relationship which grows cold and distant very quickly. At this point, I had lost interest in both Jay and Trishna. The camera loves Ms. Pinto, but she needs better material to work with.

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.