In 2013, I was on a pilgrimage tour with my folks, as one usually is once in a lifetime, if one is born in any Indian family. Our pilgrimage tour consisted of about thirty temples of Tamil Nadu covered in a span of five days.
The last temple stop was the magnificent Meenakshi Sundareshwar Temple in Madurai, a few hours before we had to catch a flight and come back to Mumbai.
That day, I fell in love with the Meenakshi Amman temple’s architecture, and it wasn't even on full display, since we visited on a blistering hot afternoon.
Watching the trailer for Netflix’s Meenakshi Sundareshwar hands down gave me all the feels I’d experienced one afternoon years ago.
It is splendidly colourful. Each frame shot to glorious technicolor perfection. The Amman gopuram was also in prominent display in the background of a few shots, making the 2013-year-old me incredibly happy.
And the glimpses of my grandma’s hometown of Madurai (which Abhimanyu Dassani doesn’t pronounce correctly) were as sun-drenched and gorgeous as I remember it to be.
It also stars the multifaceted Sanya Malhotra in a role that gives her scope to display all her fine talents as an actor and artist. From frame one, diminutive, Madurai silk-clad Meenakshi makes it quite clear she’s the alpha in the relationship and the film.
Whether it is 'interviewing' her prospective groom, spicing up the bedroom with some saucy role play or declaring “I want to make a big difference in a small firm," this girl knows her own mind. Meenakshi is in charge.
The groom-grilling scene is a clear throwback to the antiquated practice of having a prospective bahu shiver in her dainty payals as she demurely answers questions about cooking, cleaning and singing to her in-laws' satisfaction. It felt like such a comeuppance moment, especially when contrasting with the automatically beta role Sundar takes on at the beginning of their relationship.
If the teaser focused on establishing Meenakshi, the trailer pays full homage to her character’s arc. From a young to-be-millennial-bride brimming with sass, she becomes a blushing newlywed, very much in love with her husband and finally dons the mantle of the partner-wife – whether it is supporting her husband’s dream of working for a major IT company or pulling a Saathiya and walking in on him having fun with a random girl at a party.
And it was refreshing to see a beta character like Sundar get some screen time. Dassani’s quietly rebellious Sundar doesn’t join his family’s business and picks a headstrong small-town girl as his bride. But, then, he does what millions of Indians have done - become an IT engineer and join a software company in, haha, Bengaluru.
This is where the conflict gets juicy for the couple and the story picks up steam. Can a newly-wed couple handle the heartbreaks and conflicts of a 'commuting marriage' without falling apart?
I purposely call this a commuting marriage instead of a long-distance relationship because the travel time between Bengaluru and Madurai is eight hours by road and an hour by flight.
Commuting marriages are hard, inherently, because the constant travel is physically and emotionally exhausting. And the trailer clearly establishes Sundar’s inability to bring his wife to the big city or place him in her small-town. I hope they’re able to sufficiently explain this conflict because as things stand it doesn’t seem insurmountable.
The storytelling of Meenakshi Sundareshwar’s trailer does justice to the millennial-in-love-but-facing-problems-while-growing-together trope. One that Mani Ratnam’s OK Kanmani did so spectacularly while placing the story in Mumbai.
While I am in no way an expert on all things Tamil, but a cursory glance at the IMDB page of Meenakshi Sundareshwar shows almost zero representation of a culture and people the film attempts to hopefully capture.
As a writer, my first job is to hire sensitivity experts to accurately represent the culture for the story I’m trying to tell.
Meenakshi Sundareshwar's writer-director Vivek Soni may have extensive filmmaking experience but his understanding of Tamil culture sadly remains relegated to a Rajni shrine and a bhabhi-devrani relationship based on Dhanush-Rajni love. ‘Maas’ (mass appeal in Tamil fandom-speak) is not the only signifier of Tamilians.
Neither is a sweetly opinionated, perpetually sari-and-flower-in-perfectly-curly-hair wearing girl who makes the best of her Tier-2 city existence. Or a veshti-clad, nalla pullai, whose only crime is working a white-collar job in one of India’s urban metropolises and speaks ‘Engineer’ in hopes of wooing his headstrong bride.
In fact, with the exception of Meenakshi’s father, played to crusty perfection by Shiv Kumar Subramaniam, the cast all speak Hindi and are from Hindi-speaking backgrounds. Full marks to Sanya for pulling off the accent as best as she could (in the one line of dialogue I saw) but she could have done without the Rajni-in-sunglasses callback.
From the trailer Meenakshi Sundareshwar seems, at heart, a love story between millennial newlyweds, exploring their own agencies within and without the constraints of the environments they’re in. Whether it is Meenakshi’s naalu-kettu veedu or wide-eyed Sundar’s Bengaluru sojourn. I just hope the rest of the film lives up to the Tamizhness of it all, instead of using a ‘haldi doodh’ symbolism, which is more a Hindu tradition than an inherently Tamil one. And we get more of Meenakshi’s gently gruff dad and his quiet opinions.
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