What Is the Story About?
Coming from award winning director Cheran, Cheran’s Journey follows 5 people and their individual struggles, stories and journey, as they compete to win a lucrative job in Ashok’s (Sarath Kumar) company for 4 Lakhs per month package. The show places Ameer Sultan, Divya Bharathi, Raghav, Nitesh, and Pranav at loggerheads with life in different ways, equally ambitious and fiercely competitive… While Ashok has only one job position to offer.
Performances?
Unarguably, the biggest and only saving grace of Cheran’s Journey is the casting. Sarath Kumar seamlessly pulls off the company head character. Actors Latha, Prasanna, Kashyap Barbhaya, and Aari Arjunan does a decent enough job to make the preachy tale believable, while Kalaiyarasan steals the show as he depicts the highs, lows and emotional turmoil of his life through relentless ambition.
Analysis
Cheran’s Journey is a 9 episode series from the acclaimed film-maker Cheran, that follows 5 different individuals from the different walks of life with different challenges and emotionally charged backstories vying for a coveted and hugely paid job position in a company owned by Ashok. The film takes on ambition, motivation, brain drain and its consequences and quite a few social messages all at once.
Cheran’s Journey wants the audience to empathise with the protagonists in this cut-throat and competitive world where achieving a single job position is seen as a token of ambition, where they put their all and go all out to make it in life. Coming from different tragedies themselves, five of them are picturised as equally qualified altruistic figures and the second coming of niceness. They don’t harm each other or compete with each other quite literally, which itself was not a realistic decision the makers made.
The non-linear screenplay forces viewers to sit through episodes that dont complete each of the candidate’s backstories in a single go and the narrator is an HR figure who skims through profiles. I would wonder if Indian HRs can ever be empathetic to this extent.
The Show tries to tackle a lot of social issues in Cheran’s Journey. Some of them being : the setbacks of Indian agriculture, the differential treatment meted out to muslims, the cramming immigration policies for Indians in the US, setbacks of a man accused for a crime he didn’t commit etc… All of these sound good on paper. But if there’s no conviction and nuance, none of these social commentaries matter.
Cheran’s Journey makes a terrible decision of not even scratching the surface of any of these issues. And that’s the biggest fall of a show of this nature. The unrealistic altruism the series show-cases is yawn-worthy to say the least.
To be concise, Cheran’s Journey is neither rooted nor engaging. With corny dialogues that don’t really move you and a screenplay that crams a lot of social issues without doing anything about it, the show falls under the skippable category. I mean, you aren’t missing anything if you don’t watch this one.
Music and Other Departments?
The conviction of tales of ambition and pursuit of dreams especially with the garnish of social messaging works when the music department goes all guns blazing. However, Cheran’s Journey gets no help from the music department. The dialogue and screenplay of the show is corny, boring and preachy beyond limits. The editing table fails to make an impact either.
Highlights?
– Cast – Intent and setting
Drawbacks?
– Predictable narrative
– Unconvincing dialogues
– Preachy treatment
– Relentlessly tiring screenplay
– Unbelievably altruistic ending
Did I Enjoy It?
No.
Will You Recommend It? Not really.
Cheran’s Journey Series Review by Binged Bureau