Ken Karunas’ debut movie as a director, Youth, features a structure similar to what we are now seeing in Tamil cinema, where the hero’s commercially pleasing, fun-filled life is mixed with his self-awakening track towards the end. The recent Pradeep Ranganathan movies, especially Dragon, had that structure. While Dragon had a very broad canvas that starts from the journey of the guy being a college student to going through an entire corporate life to realize his mistakes, here everything happens within the span of two years. With teenage tantrums and romances getting used for fun and the family dynamics giving an emotional foundation to the idea, Youth is a typical entertainer with good highs and not-so-bad lows.
Praveen, our main man, is a teenager who has just cleared his 10th exam with passing marks. His equation with his father is troublesome, and his mother is his only supporter. She is doing some unthinkable stuff to get Praveen a seat in the same school for 12th grade. What we see here is how romance changes and shapes Praveen’s life during the two years of his Plus Two life.
The first half of the movie has a fast-paced narrative that basically revolves around Praveen’s obsession with being loved. He is seen as this mini Casanova who is loving two girls at once, and he gives excuses like he can’t say no to anyone when being called as a womanizer. After that whole chaos, the movie somewhat gets the shape of that typical men’s locker room talk, where they eventually end up with the idea that all girls are like that. When it comes to the second half, there is still this aspect of getting friend-zoned as a theme in the movie. However, towards the final act of the movie, Ken Karunas manages to plug the family idea into this character’s journey. That helps the movie to have a climax that is built on emotions, and there is a mature conclusion to Praveen’s flings.
There is a derivative feel to the concept, as we have seen similar dynamics and arcs in various other movies. The father-mother-son dynamic in VIP can be seen here in the family equation. Then that typical bitch-shaming of the female characters is also happening in the story. Since the movie is about teenagers, I think they have skipped the Tasmac song. For a larger part of the story, we are seeing everything from the point of view of the hero, and hence some of the stuff we witness is extremely problematic. There is a deliberate effort to make it a film that can be celebrated in theaters, and hence some of the humor and romance are on the visually loud side. But the good thing is that Ken Karunas knows where to stop it before it reaches the cringe zone. Almost all the songs by GV Prakash Kumar are beautiful, and the simple, silly milieu of the movie gets great support through those songs.
Ken Karunas has the charm required to be this loverboy character. It is a character in that filmy zone, and it can look overdone if the meter goes a bit too high. Ken manages to handle that neatly. Suraj Venjaramood plays the role of the hero’s father. Even though he is not there at every point, whenever he appears, he scores the most. In the initial areas, he makes us laugh out loud with his humor, and towards the end, he handles the emotional bits, which are integral to the script. Devadarshini, as Praveen’s mother, Saroja, is the new-age version of Saranya Ponvannan playing that naive, supportive character who will buy anything her son says. Coming to the female leads, Meenakshi and Priyanshi are getting to play these love interest characters who are slightly over the top in terms of tone. Anishma Anilkumar gets to play a nerdy heroine in this movie, and her typical dialogue delivery worked for the humor in the initial bits. When the story goes into a melodramatic phase towards the end, I had a fear that her voice might not match that kind of pitch, and to my surprise, she was able to do something to her usual voice to add a sense of maturity to that character.
On the whole, Youth manages to be a package with familiar yet fun and emotional chapters. It has the intention to be a gallery pleaser that will work for all categories of the audience, and hence some of the sequences are treated in that eccentric manner, and there is a certain level of spoonfeeding as well. Even though the teenage ideologies of the hero are taking the story into problematic zones, Ken Karunas makes sure that his film doesn’t end up looking like an endorsement of those mindsets. With the final bits managing to focus on the positive shade of a dysfunctional middle-class family, Youth shapes up as a passable, fun film.
