Don movie review: Sivakarthikeyan's well-intentioned film is bogged down by commercial clichés

Imagine a mix of Three Idiots (or Nanban) and Santhosh Subramaniam, with a dash of Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya? That’s Don for you. It’s a familiar premise. Chakravarthy (Sivakarthikeyan) aka Don is an unambitious college student. He has a controlling father (Samuthirakani) who is fanatical about marks. Whenever Chakravarthy fails, his father shaves his head -- as an act of shame. A perennially stifled Chakravarthy tries hard to break the cycle, but like most Indian students end up in an engineering college -- where he tries to figure out what he is good at.

Don is a well-intentioned film. It aims to speak of the well-oiled processing machine that our education system is. No matter what the input is, the output needs to be the same. It also aspires to speak of the steadfast faith Indian parents have in this system. But for a film with such lofty ideals, Don’s writing rarely engages with nuance. It only deals with extremes. For example, the film’s main two ‘villains’ are Chakravarthy’s father and his college’s disciplinary head Boominathan (SJ Suryah). Pre-dominantly, they are one-note characters. If Chakravathy’s father is obsessed with marks, Boominathan is obsessed with discipline. Their behaviour is shown as borderline tyranny. But later, this is rationalised in just a few seconds and they magically transform into kinder, empathetic humans when they realise that Chakravarthy has a ‘dream’. There’s no denying that they might want the best for their son/student. But their good intentions do not erase the emotional trauma Chakravarthy faces due to their behaviour. Reality doesn’t function in binaries, but this is the nuance that you cannot expect from Don’s writing.

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The convenience in writing is not just limited to the characters, but also the overall narrative and setting. The first half of the film is unsurprisingly light. It heavily depends on humour, and Sivakarthikeyan’s comic skills. A few moments bring a smile to the face, like the parody of an iconic sequence from Baasha. But the universe is largely established without much logic in its setting. For all his love for discipline, Boominathan is pretty lax about Chakravarthy's informal clothing and jeans. The smaller details vanish. Students in the crowd, watching a cultural performance, are armed with glitter pom-poms. With the help of a naive dean, Chakravarthy almost gets away with everything -- from counterfeit applications to meaningless strikes.

Don’s emotional effectiveness is bogged down by the commercial cliches and platitudes. Chakravarthi finds his true calling in cinema -- he wants to become a director. It’s met with resistance from his father and girlfriend Angayarkanni (Priyanka Mohan) for obvious reasons. The film acknowledges it, only superficially. Thousands of talented people might not make it in the industry, but Chakravarthi is not one of them because… he is the hero. Even elephants step aside to give way to him. In true Suryavamsam-style, he becomes a pan-Indian success with just one short film and a feature film.

Angayarkanni might be a bold girl. She protects a friend by slapping a senior who harassed her friend. But when faced with such a situation herself, all she does is patiently wait for the hero to save her. How will the hero fight otherwise? Not to mention, Angayarkanni has to say things like, 'Women prefer making their men successful, than being with successful men.' It's not a personal decision, but a standard and judgement for all women -- especially commercial film female leads. Fights and songs seem like unnecessary embellishments to the already exaggerated narrative.

In his book The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini observes the paradox that are cliches. ‘I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché,’ he writes. It's a good way to describe Don. The film's strength lies in its emotional core, which sadly still holds a lot of relevance in the Indian context. The performances largely bring this inherent ‘truth’ to the front. Sivakarthikeyan, Samuthirakani, and SJ Suryah give compelling performances that almost make us forgive the contrivances and exaggerations in treatment. Well, almost.

Rating: 2.5/5

Don is playing in cinemas

Ashameera Aiyappan is a film journalist who writes about Indian cinema with a focus on South Indian films.

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