Load of rubbish!!

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Set in contemporary Mumbai, TRISHNA is the tragic tale of a young woman (Freida Pinto) plucked from a village by a rich entrepreneur (Riz Ahmed) to live the high life, but finds herself very much at his beck and call with very little opportunity for self-determination. The story is an object lesson in how to understand the phrase "all that glisters is not gold," while pointing out the evils of capitalism in the newly-rich world of the Indian bourgeoisie.Michael Winterbottom's film has a fine sense of place, stressing the contrasts between the young woman Trishna's rural origins, her new life in Mumbai and her subsequent decampment to Rajasthan, where she is expected to work as a servant to Jay - the entrepreneur - while being a lover at the same time. The combination of roles proves too much for her, leading to a violent denouement. Jay is portrayed as a superficial character for whom money has far more importance than love; on many occasions the two concepts are deliberately conflated so that he can achieve his ends. Riz Ahmed turns in a fine performance, his facial expressions seldom changing as he returns to India from a prosperous life in London and expects the local people to act at his beck and call.Stylistically speaking, however, TRISHNA is rather irritating. Winterbottom's camera finds it difficult to focus on one particular object or person at a time; the shooting style is jerky, with several fast cuts between one thing and another. This serves a thematic purpose - to underline the superficialities of Jay's existence - but becomes rather difficult to watch. Consequently we find it difficult to sympathize with the protagonists - especially Trishna, even though she is very much the victim of a patriarchal society. Freida Pinto turns in a nuanced performance, but Winterbottom does not allow us to focus much on her facial expressions. The film might have worked better as a tragic love story if he had permitted us to understand her complex state of mind more fully.

Michael Winterbottom is famous for making his actresses undress and perform 'nekkid'. Not so in this movie and that is the spoiler although I rather see it as an 'unspoiler', since you will not spoil time seeing this film when I reveal this. The main actress is beautiful and comes away from this movie quite 'unspoiled', which means not 'nekkid'.The film is 210 minutes long and the action begins in the 90tieth minute and ends shortly afterwords. Before that there are pictures of India that at times are nice looking and there is a beautiful song when the end titles begin, which maybe is a little late for a movie to be beautiful.If you take a classy movie and remove the porn, then you may still have a classy movie but if you take a classy porn and remove the porn, what will you get then? There was a classy movie on the same subject as this film by Roman Polanski called 'Tess'. It was so classy that I do not even remember if there was any porn or nakedness in it. It was beautiful from the very start to the very end but I do not even remember if the music was beautiful or if there was any music in it at all.Here there is a lot of music and a lot of dancing - so much so, that you begin to wonder if Indians do nothing but dance. Certainly they seem to love dancing judging by the Bollywood movies that are full of it and unintentionally hilarious because of it. There's so much dancing in Bollywood movies that if you see just one of them you will not want to dance for the rest of your life! So this is Tess with Indian dancing and this is Winterbottom without the bottoms or buttocks. And there is the fast forward button and if you sit on it with your bottom while watching and your bottom is small enough not to interrupt the beam from the remote control you may maybe endure seeing this movie.

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.

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.