Miss India (Telugu,Netflix)

Starring Keerthy Suresh, Rajendra Prasad, Jagapathi Babu

Directed by Narendra Nath

Rating: **

Miss India is like a practical joke that just doesn’t know where to stop. It goes on past 2 hours way past its punchline to an exhausting finish when the film’s female hero, the very pretty Keerthy Suresh, here reduced to a series of defiant postures which make her look like the highschool bully who won’t do her homework because… well, everyone else is doing it,emerges winner in this loser of a film.

Right from her childhood Manasa Samyukhta enjoys her cup of chai. Fine. But that doesn’t mean she can turn the whole of America away from coffee into tea addicts In any case,how Indian is tea? The Chinese and British like it as much we Indians. China recently found another way of owning the world, leaving Manasa Samyukhta to sell chai to America.

On the idea level Miss India is not an outright damp squib. But the execution is deplorably poor. The direction at times borders on the absurd. Sundry characters flit in and out in pairs and bunches looking uncertainly in the air as though waiting for the director to call the shots. By the time Manasa Samyukhta moves to San Francisco (the visuals are so postcard-like you pine for a bull in a chai shop) with her family to pursue her dreams a good 60 minutes of film’s playing time is done.

Samyukhta’s actual ascendancy as the chai queen happens in the second-half .Events are crammed into plot post mid-point like a dinner party where the hostess forgot the food in the oven. As the ambitious wannabe entrepreneur Keerthy Suresh comes across more as obstinate than focused. Pursing her lips defiantly when scolded by her family for dreaming too high, writing off the man who wants to marry her with a nose-flaring diatribe(“What gave you the impression that I wanted to marry you?”), and most of all, taking on her business rival KSK(Jagapathi Babu) who is the Coffee King about to be shown his place by the Tea Queen, Keerthy knows this is her film. What she doesn’t is,owning the film is like owning an elephant in a highrise apartment.

The plot is so driven by stereotypes and clichés that I often wondered if I was missing something. The characters are all stiff and uni-dimensional,the worst blow coming from actor Naresh as Samyukhta’s father with early signs of Alzeihmer’s. His forgetfulness becomes a running joke in the plot.I wondered what is worse, slotting a woman into tradition-bound roles in life, or ridiculing a serious illness because the director just doesn’t know where to stop. While the narrative is choppy and filled with labored humour , the performances by Caucasian actors in bit parts is unintentionally hilarious. Not only do they behave as though they would rather be anywhere else than in this , their voices are dubbed by Indians trying to sound American. Which is almost as bad as selling chai to a nation hooked to coffee.

Chai with Karan, anyone?