‘Miss You’ movie review: Siddharth, Ashika Ranganath’s romance drama is a contrived, forgettable affair

“If little by little you stop loving me I shall stop loving you little by little. If suddenly you forget me, do not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you,” goes a stirring verse in Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s ‘If You Forget Me.’ N Rajasekar’s romance drama Miss You claims to be peppered with inspirations of Neruda; the poet inspires the protagonist, a filmmaker, to write a story, and even the trailer cut draws the film’s story as inspired by a Neruda poem. From this information and the title, you might naturally expect a poignant exploration of love, falling out of love, loss, longing, and the fear of being forgotten, but Miss You is anything but that. Starring Siddharth and Ashika Ranganath as a mismatched couple, Miss You is a predictable two-hour episode that goes after low-hanging fruits and offers forgettable returns.

In Miss You, Vasudevan (Siddharth), an aspiring filmmaker, gets into the crosshairs of a powerful minister, resulting in a nasty car accident that leaves him with a loss of memory. Vasu forgets everything that has happened in his life in the last 2 years, and how the story drips information to fill this gaping void is the biggest draw of Rajasekar’s story.

Vasu meets Subbulakshmi A.K.A Subbu (Ashika) on a random trip to Bengaluru and immediately falls for Subbu’s rebelliousness (she fights for pro-hijab, and we hear a song that goes ‘Mehrooba’, but she isn’t a Muslim; an ironic cop-out for a film that speaks of rebelliousness). Vasu’s attempts to woo her range from creepy to cringe, but we are expected not to judge him because she pays no heed to his antics, and it gets revealed — drum roll — that he’s after someone he has forgotten but is sub-consciously enamoured by. What had transpired between Vasu and Subbu, whether Vasu figures it out, and whether the couple gets together makes up the rest of the story.

Memory loss is a potent trick to weave such pulpy stories, but that we have seen more complex takes in this sub-genre makes Miss You a predictable affair. For instance, a delectable cup of coffee trumps Siddharth as the subject in a dramatically-staged opening scene at a cafe; with drool-worthy slow-mos of Vasu sipping the coffee that he’s “never going to forget” and an odd dialogue about whether specials on the menu are really special, we are instantly asked to take note of this Bella Coffee. So when he suffers memory loss, it doesn’t need Einstein to figure out why this coffee is important to the plot. This is also why it doesn’t take much to wonder if and how Vasu and Subbu might have shared a history he no longer remembers.

Miss You has several novel ideas on paper that fall short of becoming something worth remembering. Like the pattern of how three isolated traffic accidents bring this couple together, wipe out Vasu’s memory, and lead to an obstacle on their journey together. Or how both times Vasu meets Subbu, he’s travelling on a trip. Yet, in a screenplay as contrived as this, you wonder if these observations are even noteworthy.

A scene at a railway station points out how poor the writing and execution of ideas can get. Vasu sees a man, a stranger, resigned into misery on a platform bench and starts a conversation. This is a common event that might have happened to most of us. But then, in hearing this man’s story, Vasu purposely misses his train. The run-of-the-mill story that Bobby (Karunakaran) says also negates justifications that it was the story that compelled Vasu to hang back. After being offered straightforward advice, Bobby changes his heart and takes Vasu, a stranger he met, on a trip to Bengaluru. Life can be stranger than fiction, but you need some logic in cinema, isn’t it?

Like its amnesiac protagonist, the film too skips telling vital bits of information, leaving you puzzled. For instance, in a scene involving Subbu, her father (Ponvannan), and Vasu’s father (Jayaprakash), it’s revealed that these two men are buddies. The film casually throws that in, and given where the equation between Subbu and Vasu stands at that time, you expect a reveal in which these characters piece this information together, but this never happens.

If this is the case with such peripheral sub-plots, even the narrative involving Vasu and Subbu seems so contrived and patchy. Except for a few issues arising from their incompatibility, we hardly understand where these characters stand and what they want from their relationship. At one point or the other, Vasu and Subbu are rendered mere pawns to the story. Firstly, how did the invasive society we live in let Vasu live unaware of this life-changing relationship that he was in? Say you lost your memory; wouldn’t you do something to understand how your life has changed, or say what you had done in your profession if not your personal life? Vasu seems unfaced after recovering from the accident, going about life as if he forgot a story pitch and not two years’ worth of memories.

Ashika Ranganath and Siddharth in a still from ‘Miss You’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Nothing comes close to how miserably Subbu’s character is written. In a bid to show how compulsive she can get, the scene set on the bus makes her truly despicable, obnoxious, and entitled. In a scene at a wedding, she bullies kids by popping their balloons, and the film finds a self-aware spark through a red-herring of a song that leads to Siddharth hilarious critiquing the ‘loosu ponnu heroine’ cliche in Tamil cinema (accompanied by self-aware bite on how this was brought upon by Genelia’s character in Santosh Subramaniam, the Tamil remake of Siddharth’s Bommarillu).

But you can’t help but notice how out of sync this seems for her character. Often not, she ends up as a damsel in distress or as a reactionary tool to whatever Vasu has to say about her. Neither do we understand what Subbu desires, nor are we told what she has to say about the idea of getting married to Vasu. At no point in its two-hour run does this relationship drama seem like it wishes to tell a love story worth investing in.

Compelled to make it more commercial, Rajasekar adds a meet-cute song, unnecessary fights, and a bar song, losing out on vital time that could have been used to explore these two lead characters. You are reminded of the potential of the concept when Subbu sings Bharathiyar’s ‘Aasai Mugam Marandhupoche’ in one of the better scenes. However, the story we follow does no justice to the concept taken. Because Miss You doesn’t take itself so seriously to tell anything novel, we also struggle to take it seriously. Because “If little by little you stop loving me…”