Meenakshi Sundareshwar Review: Unwatchable!

Meenakshi Sundareshwar on Netflix is a 2021 Bollywood rom-com with Sanya Malhotra and Abhimanyu Dassani in the primary roles with Vivek Soni as the director. The storyline revolves around a newly-wed couple, who before getting to know each other, find themselves in an accidental long-distance relationship situation and subsequently learn to manage their love life through video calls and WhatsApp texts. The remainder of the film explores the complications and the hardships they face together as a couple and how they manage to overcome them.

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Let’s try to overview the very few positives I observed in this two-hour-twenty-minute Netflix Original. Meenakshi Sundareshwar, like every other Karan Johar venture, is a visually appealing movie. The aesthetics, color combinations, set design, and costumes blended together really well to make the film very pleasing to the eye. Debojeet Ray’s cinematography, accompanied by Justin Prabhakaran’s music elevated this movie at least on a technical level.

With that out of the way, let’s discuss the actual problem with Meenakshi Sundareshwar. So, just to set things up, this movie takes place in Madurai and Bangalore for the most part, and the characters you come across are Tamilians who are born in Tamil Nadu, but somehow they manage to talk and converse in Hindi.

Now, I understand this is a Bollywood film, but did anyone from Nadigar Sangam (South Indian Artistes’ Association) banish this movie to not be produced in Tamil? Did Netflix India think that this film wouldn’t pull a good-enough response from South India? A region where the global streaming giant is trying soo hard to make their strategy work? Or did they come to a baffling conclusion that Tamil actors are just not capable to play these roles?

Even the bit players, like the waiter who takes the order at a mess speak in fluent Hindi. Additionally, Vivek Soni, the director, for some odd reason, thought it would be a good idea to throw in a couple of Tamil words at the beginning, and the end of every conversation. And in my opinion, it makes the entire situation look even worse cause the actors’ pronunciation does not feel authentic or serviceable.

Like it is not difficult to give a tiny bit of reasoning of why Tamilians from Tamil Nadu are articulating in Hindi, maybe just take a little time to detail that the family is half Tamil, and they decided to move from a major Hindi speaking State to Tamil Nadu or something along those lines. Just do not assume that the viewers who took the time to watch your movie are plain stupid or dumb or will not care about the finer details.

Moving on, I felt that the chemistry was lacking between the lead couple. And I liked their performances in their previous outings. Sanya Malhotra was fantastic in Pagglait, and Abhimanyu Dassani was a comical delight in Mard Ko Dar Nahi Hota. But, in Meenakshi Sundareshwar, their characters were one-dimensional, and there is no relatability factor cause the actors are not (again) from South India.

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Overall, solely for those significant reasons, Meenakshi Sundareshwar on Netflix is unwatchable as I regretted spending my weekend watching this film even on 1.5x speed. Karan Johar (who also produced 2 States) should stop obsessing over South Indian aesthetics and should avoid embarrassing himself in his upcoming films. But, this is just my opinion.

‘Meenakshi Sundareshwar’ Rating – 2/5

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