Sundaram Master Review

The first outsider to enter Miryalametta in ninety years, Sundaram Master (Harsha Chemudu) encounters an odd world. Dark skin is a desirable trait there. Plumpness is sexy. Being both dark-skinned and overweight, he is practically the hottest guy in the village. Women fawn over him, and even try to catch a glimpse of him in the shower. But the real shocker for Sundaram, who has come to teach English and also covertly find a treasure rumoured to be hidden in the village, comes when these simpleton tribals talk back to him in perfect English. Every person in Miryalametta is curiously fluent in the language. As Sundaram tries to hoodwink them, he learns lessons of his own.

Sundaram Master has a great many noble ideas it wants to convey. It is a commentary on the arbitrary beauty standards of the world; and a denouncement of our culture of over-consumption, our disregard for nature, our love of gold and cash, and our bad diets. It explores all these through the utopia of Miryalametta, where everybody seems blissfully happy, well-adjusted and disease-free. Their funerals are a celebration - they see death as a natural process and not something to wail over. (The thing that bothers them far more than death is incorrect spelling. After an unbelievable story about how they came to learn English, we also learn that they've evolved their own ways of spelling over the years. When Sundaram Master spells out "Donkey" instead of "Donki", they tie him to a tree and nearly kill him.) When Sundaram hands out shiny trinkets like calculators and lipsticks, they have no use for them. And when asked what the most valuable thing in the village is, Myna (Divya Sripada), the poetic weather-teller who spends her time atop the hills staring into the skies, talks about nature being the greatest treasure of all. These are the kind of holier-than-thou expositions that ruin a perfectly fun movie.

Heavy exposition gums up the entire plot, so that pretty much nothing moves forward in the second half. It is all talk, talk and more talk. Entire sub-plots get thrown out or resolved through trite conversations, even letter-writing.

And all of this is made less tolerable by the unconvincing world of Miryalametta itself. The sets look fresh off the rack, lacking that lived-in feeling. We see the same 10 villagers over and over again. And there is no apparent family structure to them. Many, many questions linger: How did they protect themselves from outsiders with no apparent weapons or sophisticated technology? How did Sundaram reach the village if it was so inaccessible? How did Sundaram get his daily fix of cricket ...on his phone ...when there is no electricity ...given that this is supposed to be an uncontacted tribe?

You wouldn't care much for logic and credibility if the movie were a satire - which it seems to be in its first few promising scenes. But then the film takes an unfortunate turn into "social messaging" territory and instantly becomes forgettable. The English-speaking tribal gimmick that carried the first half's comedy becomes the film's most cringe-y element that overstays its welcome by the sappy finale.

Actor Viva Harsha seems happy to be inside a fictional world where he won't be held back by his untraditionally "hero" looks. But then, isn't it sad that it takes a fictional topsy-turvy world for Harsha to be accepted as a hero figure?

Divya Sripada suffers under the weight of her preachy character and hefty lines ("We have a great many precious things here", one of her lines goes).

Sundaram Master might have fared better as an all-out, in-your-face satire. But the preachy (and very boring) dialog and the heavy-handed background score strip it of all fun until it becomes an unrecognizably sad film by the end.