Miss India Movie Review: Keerthy Suresh film is a silly rags-to-riches tale

Keerthy Suresh’s Miss India, directed by Narendra Nath, is about a woman who rises above difficulties to keep her chai business afloat in the US.

Janani K

Chennai
November 4, 2020
UPDATED: November 4, 2020 13:37 IST

Keerthy Suresh's Miss India is a silly tale of a woman entrepreneur.

Director Narendra Nath’s Miss India, starring Keerthy Suresh, is a tale of a female entrepreneur who works her way up to set up a business in the US. The rags-to-riches story of Manasa Samyuktha (Keerthy Suresh) aims to aspire women to beat all odds to emerge victorious in a man’s world. But, according to Manasa’s family, business is not a woman’s cup of tea. Even when it is a cup of tea.

Even when Manasa is less than 10 years old, her dad is shown disregarding her academic results because being a topper doesn’t matter if one doesn’t have a goal. She grows up with her grandfather who brews herbal tea in their village of Lambasingi. The herbal tea, as we are told, will cure people of stomach ache and other issues.

Back to back tragedies push Manasa and her family to the US. Though this has opened up a new world for Manasa, her mom and brother still keep her wings clipped saying that they’re middle-class family and cannot set up a business. They say all this despite living in a villa.

Whether Keerthy’s Manasa manages to set up her tea business in the US and take on KSK Coffee, a competitive coffee chain in the States, forms the story.

Narendra Nath’s intention to make the film with a woman entrepreneur needs to be applauded. However, the treatment given to this already stale story makes the proceedings tedious to sit through. Firstly, the chai that her grandfather brews relieves people of pain. But, Manasa’s tea doesn’t do that. In her customer’s words, however, it’s 10 times tastier than the rival KSK coffee owned by Kailash Shiva Kumar (Jagapathi Babu).

The initial stretches in the film go on to show how Manasa’s family struggles to make ends meet. In a span of a few minutes, her sister elopes, dad has Alzheimer's and grandfather passes away. These tragedies are supposed to make you feel for the lead character. Yet, it doesn’t invoke a sense of emotion in you.

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The main disadvantage in Miss India is the over-explanatory dialogues. Right from marketing lessons to their strategies, everything is told. It doesn’t give us the opportunity to take in the visuals and process it. Keerthy randomly names her chai brand, Miss India. All it takes is two months for her to reach the stature of KSK Coffee, an already established brand in the USA.

Jagapathi Babu’s counter-strategy to cut down Miss India’s growth is to employ bikini-clad women to serve coffee in their stories. So much for a film that speaks about a woman battling sexism, misogyny in a foreign land. The film aims to highlight the struggles of women in a male-dominated society, yet on the flip side, it gives space to make them an object of the male gaze.

The dialogues are so silly. So are the strategies Keerthy and Jagapathi Babu apply against each other. You can see them coming from a mile away. It is Keerthy Suresh who tries hard to salvage the film. But, there’s only so much she can do. Even the serious scenes turn out to be unintentionally funny because of the dialogues.

SS Thaman’s music sometimes reminds one of Ala Vainkuntapurramloo. The staging of Miss India is exceptional and every frame looks beautiful.

Miss India is a pointless story of a middle-class woman who builds an empire in the US with her special chai. As Keerthy says, ‘Coffee is not her cup of tea.’ But to be honest, this chai isn't our cup of tea either.

2 out of 5 stars for Miss India.

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