Meenakshi Sundareshwar (2021)

Interesting facts

Meenakshi Sundareshwar is a 2021 Indian Hindi-language romantic comedy film directed by Vivek Soni, who co-wrote the script with Aarsh Vora and produced by Karan Johar, Apoorva Mehta and Somen Mishra, under the banner Dharmatic Entertainment, the digital arm of Johar's Dharma Productions. The film stars Sanya Malhotra and Abhimanyu Dassani as the titular characters, a newly-wed couple, who were forced to live apart due to a unique job prospect and struggles with the problems arising from their long-distance marriage.

Production

In September 2019, Karan Johar announced the partnership of Dharmatic Entertainment, the digital arm of Johar's Dharma Productions, with Netflix to present their original contents. As a part of the deal, three films — the anthology drama Ghost Stories, Guilty and an untitled film with Vivek Soni was announced.

He further added about the setting and characterisation of the film, in an interview with Bollywood Hungama, saying: "The story organically blends into the setting of Madurai because the film is called Meenakshi Sundareshwar and the basic incident which happens in the family, the reason the both of them get married is because both their first names together make the famous temple of Madurai.

This is the debut film directorial of Vivek Soni. He earlier directed a short film Bawdi (2012), which received critical acclaim and was also featured as a segment in the anthology film Chaar Cutting (2015). He worked as an assistant director in the romantic-comedy film Hasee Toh Phasee (2014), produced by Johar's Dharma Productions and also co-ordinated visual effects for Ra.One (2011) and Vishwaroopam (2013).

Both, Dassani and Malhotra play the titular characters in the film. Speaking about the characterisation of the leads, Malhotra stated, "Meenakshi and Sundareshwar are two very different personalities. Meenakshi is very confident, she's out there, she speaks her mind whereas Sundar is very reticent and shy.

Principal photography began on 25 November 2020, the date of the film's announcement. It was initially set to begin in mid-March 2020, but was interrupted due to the COVID-19 lockdown in India. During the long period, Soni decided to work on the characterisation of the two leads. Dassani stated that "we [Dassani and Malhotra] had intense readings before we started shooting for the film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.