Miss India movie review: Keerthy Suresh can’t save silly film from being a mega bore

Miss India
Director - Narendra Nath
Cast - Keerthy Suresh

Keerthy Suresh’s Miss India, directed by Narendra Nath, is supposed to be a story of female empowerment but it’s really just an uninspiring and boring film about an ambitious woman who wants to prove her naysayers wrong. The intent to tell a story around a woman entrepreneur’s rise sounds exciting on paper, but unfortunately it doesn’t translate into an engaging story. In fact, it’s an ordeal to sit through Miss India, which makes a mockery of small businesses.

Keerthy plays Manasa Samyuktha, who aspires to build a business empire by opening a chain of chai stores in the US, which is traditionally a country of coffee-drinkers. She wants to call her chain Miss India.

Watch the Miss India trailer here

 

As an 8-year-old, she’s told that having a goal in life is more important than good grades. She grows up with the dream of making it big in the world of business, and despite coming from a middle class family, she lands in San Francisco. From a small house in Araku, they move into a villa in San Francisco, but we are still made to believe it’s a struggling family. After completing her MBA, Manasa tells her family she wants to start her own business, but her family opposes her decision. She eventually leaves home and goes on a rocky journey of survival.

There’s so much Miss India gets wrong in its writing that it leaves one scratching their head. For instance, there’s a scene in which Manasa, an MBA graduate from an international university, sets up a chai truck without a license in the US. When she’s pulled up by the police, she tries to convince them by saying that she’s just selling chai and it’s her life. It’s such a silly scene and unfortunately one of many such gems you’ll find throughout the film. Also, Miss India, released in 2020, tries to make us believe that the Americans haven’t heard about Indian chai.

The film is full of characters that are outright silly. Early in the film, we are told that Manasa’s father (played by Naresh) is suffering from Alzheimer’s. It’s disappointing that the director and his writer decided to make a joke out of a real medical condition by using the character as comic relief. Jagapathi Babu, who hasn’t changed his look in years, plays a sexist businessman who runs a successful coffee business. He laughs when Manasa approaches him for funding for her business. All the foreign characters are just plain stupid.

You won’t feel a thing for Manasa’s character. Keerthy Suresh continues to shock by continuing to pick subpar projects. It’s almost as if she’s slowly losing all the adulation she earned for her performance in the Savitri biopic, Mahanati. In spite of being supremely talented, there’s hardly anything that Keerthy can do to save Miss India from turning out to be a mega bore.

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