Saad Khan Trishna – CATCH IT (B) Trishna is loosely based upon critically acclaimed 1800's novel "Tess of the D'Urbervilles". This is a story of young girl whose life is destroyed by the circumstances and love. Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a beautiful novel and the story is more complex than Michael Winterbottom decides to adopt in his adaptation. Here the director only chooses to pick up the poor girl and a rich man who first makes and then destroys her life. He left many key characters and moment from the magnificent novel, which I think would have made this movie more interesting. Otherwise Trishna seemed more like an erotic version relies on sex only. Once you become aware of the novel you will understand that the director chooses an easy way to make this an erotic bonanza. We never gets to hear why Trishna doesn't leave from sexual abuse later or at least tell him that she is felling like a sexual victim but sadly we never get to hear her point of view. She does what she was told by men in her life from her father to the man she falls in love with. Freida Pinto is truly a Revelation, starting from Slumdog Millionaire, then to Red Woman in Woody Allan's ensemble YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER to Immortals with Henry Cavill to Rise of the Planet of the Apes with James Franco and now in Trishna, she has proved why everyone wants to work with her. Riz Ahmed is superb; he is charming, passionate and evil in one body all together. On the whole Winterbottom successfully adopted the Indian atmosphere and also was able to take out brilliant performance from Freida Pinto and Riz Ahmed but I think he failed to do justice to the Thomas Hardy novel "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" because it was never about eroticness it was about a young girl destroyed by her circumstance. If I forget it's based upon this novel than it's a very nice movie.

charsobees As simple, inconsistent, and implausible this movie was, I still feel like it has a certain richness, a mood that is melodramatic but so incomplete as to be almost trite, and an eroticism both tedious and provocative. Unfortunately, the movie's half-hearted sense of duty towards a novel creates an ending that is implausibly detached from the rest of the story. Beautiful Trishna is seen by Jai, a lad of the upper class. He becomes smitten by her, and then some. Trishna is shown as someone who has taken all the kicks life could dish out and grown accustomed to them with a polite smile. What truly goes on in her mind we are not clearly shown, but by her attitude of consistent formality and subservience to Jai it is obvious that she entertains no delusions about her place in the great and rigid hierarchy of humanity. Her actions and character are interesting and engaging right up to the parts before the last third of the movie. Before those scenes, I could perceive her as a completely realized character. In the last third, however, the characters and their relationship become simplistic and exaggerated, and no motives are given for their changed actions. Jai increasingly becomes inconsiderate of Trishna's humanity, and increasingly treats her as a harlot, which causes Trishna to suddenly fatally attack him. Why Jai changes from a lover who teaches Trishna to whistle and takes her to walks by the beach, to someone who lies around reading all day, waiting for Trisha to bring lunch to him, and then upon her arrival immediately starts sexual activity with her, is unexplained. It is clear that from the start he treated Trishna as a servant, and continues till the very end, but at final third of the story, without any reason, his tenderness suddenly vanishes. Is it Jai's imposed duties by his father that are making him so cold and abusive? Or is his inner sadistic and domineering darkness expressing itself fully? If so, there is little transition or explained cause.Trishna's motive for her final blow is unclear as well. It is clear that Trishna was not taken forcibly by Jai. Unfairly? Yes. Whenever he reached to some end of the world to pick her up, he asked her and she agreed. Right up until a few minutes before she stabs him, she is wordlessly, politely, and passively serving him, reciprocating his kisses and does not seem to shrink from intercourse. Then, all together, she whispers her first few denials, shrinks from his touch, cries during intercourse/ rape, and just as immediately goes and stabs him. I was honestly expecting her to change her game and leave him; that was the only logical progression from her attitude and development. If it was a matter of money, she could have gone back to Mumbai and become a screen dancer, she even had an offer of employment there, and she loved to dance. The only way this type of ending works if there is boldly expressed passion throughout the story. It is ambiguous (but naturally so) whether Jai's inconsolable lust is a part of his love (or some other feeling) for her. Trishna's constant yielding towards Jai, despite his unfairness and abusive neglect, also shows her love for him. But this love is never really projected in a way to justify Jai's murder. The master and servant relationship seems to have been agreed upon from the start, and its participants do not deviate from their expected behavior at any time. Therefore, when this relationship becomes thwarting and violating for Trishna, her reaction to it is confusing. She was being abused from the start with her own passive acceptance. Why the sudden fatally violent counter? Another highly inconsistent matter is the treatment of sex. There is no on-screen sex in almost the first half of the movie. Then, suddenly, a little while after they move together to Mumbai, the on-screen sex is non-stop. Near the end it is so repetitive that it can come across as gratuitous and tedious. Jai's insatiable lust makes him out to be disgusting and worthless, but still not worthy of death. Therefore, when it comes, it seems baseless. All in all, it seems to me that the ending was chosen simply to fit the label of an adaptation. It basically ruins the movie. A far better ending (and movie) would have been for Trishna to break her servitude by leaving Jai, not by killing him.

Ruben Mooijman Take a classic Thomas Hardy novel and replace the setting (Victorian England) by modern India, a society that still has some of the characteristics needed to make this story believable. That's what Michael Winterbottom has done and it works wonderfully well. Where else than in India can a poor, submissive girl who has never learned to speak up for herself, have a relationship with a rich guy who is used to getting everything he wants? Of course, the love affair is doomed because of the strict social rules that are still prevalent in India. We know from the beginning there will be tragic developments because this is a remake of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Winterbottom shows us very clear that the two would-be lovers have nothing in common. For him, she is purely an object of desire, a pretty face he can show off to his friends in Mumbai and have fun with between the sheets. For her, he is an escape route from poverty, an entrance ticket to the world of the jet set and possibly to a career in Bollywood. Freida Pinto, of Slumdog Millionaire fame, is quite believable as the working class girl who is only used to obeying orders. For her, there is not much difference between saying yes to her father who asks her to fetch a glass of water, and saying yes to her lover when he asks her to move to Mumbai with him and become his live-in girlfriend. There is not much spirit in her role, and that makes you wonder if her passivity is the result of her acting talent, or, on the contrary, if it shows her lack of talent. Anyway, she plays the role exactly the way it should be. The film doesn't paint a pretty picture of India. It's all there: the rural poverty, the girls who can't go to school because there is no money, the horrible traffic accidents, the inequality between the rich and the poor. The only thing I didn't like about this film are the many scenes of successive nice-looking images, underscored by romantic music. In many of these scenes Pinto is featured very prominently, which is understandable because she is extremely beautiful. But it gets tedious after a while. I also lost count of the number of scenes where we see her carrying a tray to customers of the hotel she works in. These scenes make the story unnecessary slow and unbalanced.

Spiked! spike-online.com Filmmakers never have been able to resist indulging their love for the good ol' English canon by churning out their own rendering of classic novels. Last year was no exception, with the likes of Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre and Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights hitting our screens. But while these were both pretty decent efforts, overall they provided little more than an opportunity for the well-versed viewer to compare them to previous outings and mull over their treatment of the source material.As such, the classic novel adaptation has become little more than a type of genre flick, in which we are invited to watch a director wrestle with a well-worn story. Transposing Thomas Hardy's tragic novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles from Victorian Wessex to modern day India, as Michael Winterbottom has done with Trishna, appears on the surface to be little more than another gimmicky relocation of a classic tale. This film, however, manages to do justice to Hardy's themes whilst carving out a discernibly different kind of work that can be watched and enjoyed with fresh eyes.Hardy was writing in a period of dramatic ideological and economic transition. Victorian censoriousness was still grappling with post-Reformation libertinism while the Industrial Revolution was encroaching upon and modernising the rural world. Tess is a heroine caught in the crossfire of warring moralities. Winterbottom deftly reinterprets the character as Trishna (Freda Pinto), a teenager from a poor family, who is torn between the traditional values of her homeland in rural Rajasthan and the social and sexual liberation she later finds in Mumbai.Winterbottom has stated that he chose India because it currently bears similar ideological divides to those of nineteenth century Britain, but he in fact paints a more complex and modern picture. Far from being the 'pure woman' of Hardy's novel, whose downfall took place in spite of her moral rectitude, Trishna is a conflicted character who is grounded in the old world but drawn to the bright lights of the new.In place of the pious Angel Clare, who Tess falls in love with, and the rakish Alec d'Urberville, who robs her of her virtue, we are given Jay Singh (Riz Ahmed), a conflation of both characters. A British-born rich kid, he comes to Rajasthan to work for his father's chain of hotels and takes a shine to Trishna. The two begin to fall in love, but he unwittingly leads her to disgrace herself by succumbing to his advances. Growing tired of hiding their relationship, he suggests they leave for Mumbai, where they can live together, free from scorn.Although perhaps a little insensitive, Jay is every bit the honest and loving Angel Clare of the narrative, until a return to Rajasthan leads his darker, d'Urbevillian side to show itself. Managing one of his father's hotels, a former harem, he revels in subordinating Trishna to his depraved appetites, until she is forced to take revenge.Unlike Hardy's novel of black-and-white morality embodied by wholesome heroines and seedy villains, these modernised characters have internalised these conflicts. Winterbottom's adaptation insists upon its modern setting, and refuses to impose Hardy's hundred-year-old dynamic onto it. Trishna's downfall isn't a journey from honour to disgrace, but a process by which she is isolated between two different notions of piety, and taken advantage of by her malevolent lover. Not only does this prevent Winterbottom from casting aspersions on traditional or indeed modern values, it also makes for a far more convincing appropriation of the novel.Although Winterbottom is given a writing credit, the script was apparently little more than a set of vague outlines from which the actors were expected to improvise the dialogue. Luckily, the leads are more than up to the task, and their off-the-cuff performances lend well to portraying a tentative courtship between two different cultures. The early scenes in which Jay has to overcome the language barrier to get Trishna's attention are a naturalistic joy, yet even as things take a more dramatic turn, Pinto and particularly Ahmed remain startlingly believable.Their improvised riffs help to cast the characters into entirely different moulds, while the embrace of the Indian aesthetic allows the setting to stake new ground within the story as well. Whether Winterbottom is diving head first into the throng of the city or nestling the camera in the rugged hills of the countryside, his loose and intuitive style takes each locale as it is, capturing it with intelligence and warmth. The soundtrack, featuring a selection of original Bollywood numbers, bounces off the visuals wonderfully, whilst the incorporation of an on-screen translation of the Hindi lyrics proves a novel and expressive addition. Rather than treating India as a mere stand-in for old-world England, Winterbottom attends to it dutifully, helping to create the film's distinctive flavour.Whether you've read Tess or not, love a good adaptation or usually find them cosy, generic tripe, there's plenty to enjoy with Trishna. Instead of just guising an old story in contemporary garb, Winterbottom truly reinterprets it and in doing so finds resonance with a modern audience. Most impressively, it is an adaptation that stands firmly on its own two feet, and graces us with some inimitable and elegant performances.