In the bare bones of it all, PT Sir, starring Hiphop Tamizha Adhi, seems like just another templated hero-centric commercial entertainer — an underdog star vehicle packaged around a social message, complete with a romance track, a stock Tamil cinema villain, several heroic fight sequences, punchlines, and what not. But a first-time viewer, around 20 minutes into the film, might wonder if director Karthik Venugopal’s sophomore film might be a solid attempt at infusing fresher ideas into this stock formula.
There’s a lot of colour, charm and cutesy whimsicality in how we are introduced to Kanagavelu a.k.a Velu, a physical training teacher at the GP Matriculation School. The visuals and lyrics of ‘Nakkal Pudichavan da Kanagavelu’ tell you all you need to know about Kanagavelu, and at least initially, it’s hard not to like Adhi as this unassertive man-child of a PT master, dancing with school children as he makes a statement against teachers stealing PT periods.
You begin to see promise in how this plot might shape up when told of a ‘Magic Wall’ in the school, on which students write their wishes that somehow get fulfilled. Except for a few embarrassing attempts at comedy — like ones that show Velu competing with a student on who gets to romance Vaanathi (Kashmira Pardeshi), a fellow teacher — there’s a lot that works in these portions.
There’s also an effort to explain why Velu is the way he is. As per an astrologer’s prophecy, Velu should not find himself in trouble until he gets married, or he will meet an ill-fated end. And so, his mother (Devadarshini) has conditioned Velu to be so meek, to not go out at night, and to take up a 9-to-5 teacher’s job. The prophecy is also written as such to give prominence to Velu’s romance with Vaanathi, as their marriage might end his troubles.
PT Sir (Tamil)
But, as one would expect, trouble finds Velu’s way, but it has nothing to do with what a teacher in a school full of hormonal adolescents must go through. The film shifts its tone when a young woman named Nandhini (Anikha Surendran) gets assaulted by a bunch of imbeciles at a bus stop, and she gets blamed and shamed for “inviting” this upon her by wearing a “revealing” net-fitted top. When more unfortunate events follow, Velu is forced to confront GP Insitution’s Chairman, Guru Purushottaman (Thiagarajan), a man one shouldn’t be messing with.
To make the film more ‘family-friendly’ and to justify the freedom that Nandhini enjoys to take some drastic measures, the film brings back the Magic Wall and establishes how there’s a college next to the school, all to make the victim a college-going adult and not a high-school girl — which is quite unnecessary for a film that states how sexual harassment is a social evil that imperils women of all ages. And yet, the setting where Velu takes his fight for justice is neither the school nor the college, but the general society. Now, remind me why the film is titled PT Sir?
You soon realise that all this clever writing to piece together a loophole-free screenplay was to create a launchpad for Kanagavelu to become the White Saviour Knight who has come to save women. How the film goes about that is miserable as well; unlike in the case of films like, say, Thiruchitrabhalam or Maaveeran, it only takes one scene with ‘Kanda Shasti Kavasam’ playing in the background for this fearful PT master to take on a mass hero avatar. The grouse with Velu putting on this justice-seeking vigilante cloak is that he’s hardly equipped with the know-how on how to handle sensitive issues of this magnitude; this is a guy who needs an intervention to be made aware that women of all ages undergo sexual harassment in our society, and his immediate resolution to find justice is violence. And we are asked to believe that this is the same guy who goes on to do something that “shocks” even the Judiciary.
PT Sir touches upon some truly sensitive issues in the name of ‘messaging,’ but settles for low-hanging fruits for pay-offs. And even if you don’t care much about the male saviour complex, it offers nothing fresh in the David Vs Goliath fight between the hero and the villain.
If anything, an utterly contrived abracadabra moment only paints PT Sir as a film that milks women empowerment for the hero to belt out punchlines that might end up as clips on WhatsApp statuses and Instagram Reels, and to re-establish that Adhi has truly shed away his ‘Clubbula Mabbula’ past. It just so happens that any PR against victim-blaming might be good PR for our social media times, and you hope, at least, that the lesson from this PT Sir reaches its intended ears.
PT Sir is currently running in theatres
