Is Freida Pinto a one film wonder?

Mumbai-based actress Freida Pinto caught the international film world’s eye with Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. But more often than not, the one question that keeps cropping up is whether she can sustain that impact.

The actress's international  films have opened to mixed responses.  Though Pinto's choices have been unconventional, she’s yet to get the nod from critics. Filmmaker Woody Allen’s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger opened to rave reviews, but Pinto was hardly mentioned.

The film Miral, which Pinto signed soon after Slumdog Millionaire, was directed by Julian Schnabel and is based on Jebreal’s semi-autobiographical novel about the lives of three generations of women in Jerusalem. A report in guardian.co.uk said, “Very unhappily, Schnabel has cast Freida Pinto, the Indian star of Slumdog Millionaire, as young Miral, this supposedly proudly Palestinian woman. The miscasting is absolutely awful.” While Movieweb wrote, “Hiam Abbas was in Venice for the premiere of Julian Schnabel’s Miral but curiously Freida Pinto, “Miral” herself, was not. Maybe she saw some unflattering reviews coming.”

Though Pinto has projects on hand — her next project is a film called Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a science fiction and Immortals, a fantasy-action drama directed by Tarsem Singh and starring Henry Cavill and Mickey Rourke — it seems she is yet to get the green signal from Bollywood.

Trade analyst Amod Mehra said, “Freida  Pinto should have cashed in on Slumdog’s success and signed a Bollywood film at that time, but she chose to do Hollywood. She is not a star in Bollywood, so she will have her fair share of struggle like any other newcomer.”

Interestingly, in an earlier interview to New York Times, Freida Pinto had quoted, “I have done no film in India so it is very hard for people to accept me as an actress. They don’t really know who I am or they probably don’t take me too seriously.”