Avinash Ramachandran

Mohanlal and Sathyan Anthikad have been defining the emotional core of the average Malayali for over four decades now. Despite technological advancements, the propensity for action extravaganzas in today’s times, and the seeming erosion of the audience’s attention span, Mohanlal and Sathyan reunite for a film that reminds us why these two were allowed to define emotions closest to our hearts. Anger, love, fear, guilt, regret, happiness, devastating sadness, and a smile that finds its way through it all…

The moment we commodified weddings and started calling it the marriage ‘market’, many brides and grooms became products that came with a selling price, a buying price, and unfortunately, an expiry date too. They are depreciating assets, and it is one such asset that is the protagonist in director Shanmuga Priyan’s debut film, Love Marriage, a rather faithful remake of Vishwak Sen’s Ashoka Vanamlo Arjuna Kalyanam. Ramachandran (Vikram Prabhu) is in his early thirties and is already considered to be past his sell-by date. He is part of a misogynistic and casteist family, which has relaxed its rules since they haven’t found the right suitor within their caste and class. That is the scheme of things in many a family in the arranged marriage setup. And after multiple rejections due to his age, greying hair, rumours of balding, and his profession, Ramachandran’s family decides to travel far away from home and get engaged to Ambika (Sushmitha Bhat), who is from a different caste.

Tamil cinema often explores the complexities of marriage. From marital discord due to forced marriage to people falling out of love, and hoping the other one falls into love, we have seen various facets of marital life be explored in our films. And when director Nelson Venkatesan introduces a distraught Anand (Atharvaa) and a chirpy but disturbed Divya (Nimisha Sajayan) in his latest film, DNA, the stage was set for yet another exploration of two random people deciding to live their lives together. This is a space Nelson has excelled in, right from his debut film, Oru Naal Koothu, which dealt with the idea of marriage. Even in Monster, although the primary story was a man-rodent conflict, it spoke about companionship, empathy, and loneliness. And it was a culmination of all of these themes in his third film, Farhana. However, in DNA, Nelson lets go of his strong suit to put on an armour of investigative drama, and is unable to balance both with the required panache.