Miss India มิสอินเดีย (2020) [ บรรยายไทย ]

 Miss India promises to tell an often told tale – the rise of an underdog that everyone underestimates. The best part about such stories is how much you relate to the character and their circumstances, not to mention, the high you feel once you see them achieve what they set out to do. While it’s refreshing that the film aims to tell an inspiring tale of a woman, who achieves her dreams with nothing but her confidence to back her up, it’s sad just how watered down and overdrawn her journey is made out to be.

Manasa Samyuktha (Keerthy Suresh) is told by her father (Naresh) at the age of eight (!) that her good marks in school mean nothing unless she has a goal in life. Her mother (Nadhiya) wants her to be educated just so she can get married to a man who will provide a comfortable life for her. Samyuktha however has bigger dreams than her Lambasingi roots can hold, she wants to make her grandfather (Rajendra Prasad) proud and what’s more, make his Ayurvedic chai recipes world famous. When her brother (Kamal Kamaraju) lands a job in the US, it gives her the perfect opportunity to spread her wings. And the rest is really not hard to guess.

Miss Indiahas its heart in the right place, not only does it finally bring on-screen a woman character who’s relatable, it also brings forth someone whose priorities lie in building her empire and nothing else. And what’s even more refreshing is how she refuses to let anything stop her – be it her family or a shrewd, sexist businessman Kailash Shiva Kumar (Jagapathi Babu) who feels that Samyuktha’s chai business (randomly christened Miss India) might affect his already successful coffee business. The sad part is how the story is riddled with numerous unnecessary plot-points and just plain, bad writing.

It all begins on a very melodramatic note where it’s one tragedy after another, making one wonder if any of this serves a purpose to the story overall – it doesn’t. A character elopes and gets married, another gets Alzheimer and a third ones dies – all in the span of half an hour. The dialogues are also haphazard and over explanatory – like how Samyuktha’s mom points out that she has a tendency to look at her feet when she lies. You wonder if this will serve as a clue to the proceedings later on, again – it doesn’t. When the scenes of Keerthy explaining SWOT analysis to her friends or extoling on the strength of women roll around, you know too much is being relied on ‘tell’ and not ‘show’.

Narendra Nath gets all the slow-motion entries for Keerthy right, unfortunately that’s all he gets right. But it is Thaman’s background score and music (especially Naa Chinni Lokame) that makes these scenes work, more than anything else. Keerthy Suresh manages to shoulder a film, but sadly there’s only so much her and her swagger can do when she's let down by poor writing. Jagapathi Babu plays a character that is supposed to be sleazy and menacing but comes across as unintentionally funny, especially in the scenes he tries to hit on her. Miss India is definitely not the kadak masala chai it has the potential to be. Watch this one for Keerthy.