In the last 15-20 minutes of the movie Pon Ondru Kanden, Santy, the character played by Aishwarya Lekshmi, repeatedly asks the two leading men to shut up. The fed-up expressions of the leading lady and her request towards the heroes are exactly what you feel towards them throughout this movie directed by V Priya. I had seen actor Vasanth Ravi expressing his sadness on social media over the direct OTT release strategy of the film. But once I finished the film, I just couldn’t understand why Vasanth Ravi thought the movie had the potential to impress the audience with a theatrical release.
So the film is primarily about two friends, Siva and Sai. Well, they weren’t precisely friends in the beginning, and long story short, circumstances made them friends. The urban and cool Siva decided to take up the date doctor role for Sai, who was totally alien to all those concepts. Soon, Sai found someone in the apartment where he lived, and it was a chef named Santy. But Santy had a history with Siva. How the three dealt with this awkward scenario is what you get to watch in this romantic comedy.
The movie begins with this school reunion of our heroes, and we are shown both of them asking whether the other one will come. One would assume that two men, who are above the age of 30, holding grudge against one another for something that happened in school days, would have some depth. But soon we realize that it was because of a crush they both had on one girl named Tripurasundari. The way V Priya positions the grudge, reveals it through a backstory, and immediately makes the characters reconcile gives you that red flag about how the rest of the movie is going to be. After that, it is a series of scenes where they would either make characters lie or make Sai an absolute idiot because they are running out of material to make this movie a comedy.
Even though the characters are written pretty badly, Ashok Selvan is an actor who has some grip on handling humor, and since his character is not the fool in the tale, he rarely had to do the loud acting and was okay in his role. Apart from the awkwardness of having to see her in a dubbed voice, Aishwarya Lekshmi was fairly good in the character given to her. The climax was perhaps the area where she had to perform, and I think the shoddiness of the script helped her to channel the disappointment into her performance. The most disappointing performance came from Vasanth Ravi. The way he tried to portray the naivety of his character through loud acting was outright bad, and I was surprised that he fought to show this to an audience inside a theater. The only performance that was in sync with the movie’s pitch came from Deepa Shankar.
The interval block of the movie that reveals the connection between Siva and Sandy made me think that the film will now explore romance in a better way, and we will get to see some sensible conflicts in this love triangle. But the desperation to make everything funny makes the movie an extremely broad-stroke venture. The way the scenes are written for humor’s sake is sloppy, and the climax is the worst exhibition of forced humor. I have read articles about the men written by Anjali Menon, Juhi Chaturvedi, etc., and how sensitive these writers were in representing the fragile side of men. When it comes to Priya V’s men, she is almost trying to be the female counterpart of someone like Luv Ranjan in terms of how characters are conceived.
Pon Ondru Kanden is a severely underdeveloped romantic comedy that fails miserably to depict modern-day relationship dynamics. From caricature characters, and forced humor to outdated scripting tropes, V Priya’s film is such a wannabe romcom that has all the elements of modern-day relationships, but just doesn’t have the patience to understand any of them.
V Priya's film is such a wannabe romcom that has all the elements of modern-day relationships, but just doesn't have the patience to understand any of them.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
