Fantastic!

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

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.

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.

I have never seen a film attempt to create so much (unwarranted) endearment towards a character who is clearly disturbed and has a warped sense of reason and justice.Where is the character development? I don't see the point on this story at all, I'm not sure what the message is here. I'm not won over by the conflicts between class, rich and poor and Indian landscapes. That doesn't make a good movie, the story does. And to me the story is inconsistent, full of unanswered questions and quite frankly messed up. Terrible adaptation, I've not read the book but surely there is more to this story and the characters. Trishna needs a slap and a cup of coffee.

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.