The film starts with two stereotypical upper caste south Indian families looking for a match for their children. It kickstarts with the portrayal of the whole ‘arranged marriage’ system, where parents look for a suitable match for their children. Needless to say in reality, the whole system of arranged marriages has been nothing but a trick to maintain endogamy and caste purity, but telling you this would be stating the obvious, we all know why and how arranged marriages function. Another Netflix show ‘Indian Matchmaking’ is the perfect example documented to expose that truth. Coming back to the story, it is about an upper-caste couple who come from somewhat similar social backgrounds. They decided to get married because of a supposedly comical misunderstanding which their religious parents thought was divine intervention.
I just could not relate to the characters of the film, everyone looked like their main job was to sit and pray in their home temples. Everyone with Chandan tilak on their forehead. The hero Sundar played by Abhimanyu Dassani is an engineer who wants to do something on his own. His father does not like the idea, the father wants his son to help with their family business of Saris. The film shows Sundar’s struggle to become a coder in some big-shot company, well to be honest Sundar always had a plan B at his disposal, his father’s Sari Business, which makes perfect sense since the film is about the struggle of an Upper Caste boy. Sundar says that engineers make the best husbands because they are great at time management and they know how to achieve their goals even if it is impressing a girl on the first date. And that is why he is looking for a job for the past 2 years, is a virgin, never had a girlfriend and had to take the help of a marriage bureau to get married.
Minakshi played by Sanya Malhotra is a very ‘progressive’ upper-caste girl. She has done her BBA and wants to do something big at a small firm rather than being a small part of some big company. She is very clear about her goals in life, she has a voice, she can speak, she is someone who would voice her opinions in an argument. It is just that she forgets about her professional goal after marriage. She is a feminist who chose to be a supportive wife and put her husband’s needs above hers, wears a mangalsutra, doesn’t eat non-vegetarian food at home, She is submissively happy and a typical progressive fantasy daughter-in-law of every conservative upper-caste family.
After marriage, Sundar gets a job in a company that has a very weird, unethical, probably illegal and unbelievable hiring process. They hire only single people, bachelors only, for 1 year. You can not date, can not get married, just have to give your 100% to the company. For this job, Sundar has to move to Bangalore and like a good progressive wife Minakshi stays back at her in-law’s place, where at one point she gets a job too but couldn’t join as she had other responsibilities of the family, like teaching the young nephew of Sundar.
The movie not only romanticises the obsession of parents to get their children married before they do anything else in life, but the film also fetishises corporate slavery, toxic work culture, and grown-up men drinking cheap liquor on the terrace and doing weird things to get drunk. Essentially, the film is really just too made up to digest, the filmmakers could have made a sci-fi film where the boy and girl live on different planets in intergalactic adventures among aliens, and that would have been far more believable than a boy who can not let his wife stay with him because he might lose his job if anybody finds out he is married.
In this film, there are some scenes that are really bad attempts at jokes and humour and not funny at all but they have added a peppy funky soundtrack to those scenes, which kind of makes it worse.
The cinematography in the movie, however, is good.
It’s a 1.5/5 stars kind of film really.
