Writer Nivedita Pohankar reveals how she turned one of her father’s biggest worries into the core idea of Pyaar Prema Kalyanam. “My dad is a totally progressive, educated man, but he used to often talk about the prospect of growing older once my sister Aaditi and I left home after marriage. It was as though he was getting prepared for loneliness,” she begins. “He raised both of us, but he couldn’t get it out of his head that as girls, we too had the option to end up living at home with him.”
It’s a kind of conditioning, she says, that is still common among a majority of Indians. Once a couple gets married, it’s understood that they both move into the groom’s house. “What if we explore a couple wherein the girl decides to fight this notion and chooses to ask her husband to stay at her place?” That’s the one-line idea that brought Elan and Nivedita together to write Pyaar Prema Kalyanam for Netflix. The Tamil film will be available for streaming from August 21.
Elan, who will be making his acting debut with the film, wrote and directed 2018’s hit comedy Pyaar Prema Kadhal. “That was a film that dealt with a somewhat taboo topic of a couple choosing to live together, that too in a city like Chennai, with family living nearby,” says Elan. For its spiritual sequel, it was natural for him to go a step ahead. “That step had to obviously be marriage and the conflicts that come from the union of two families."
Marriage isn’t about who should go to whose house, Nivedita feels. “It’s after all about love. If that’s the case, does it matter if the girl asks the boy to move in to her house with her family?” This led Nivedita to write the first draft of the film. “I didn’t want a man's perspective to come in that early on,” says Elan, who has also directed the film, which co-stars Saanve Megghana.
But eventually, it was a team of two very different people working together. “We realised early on that we wanted to listen to each other’s opinions and how we thought about things,” she adds. It also helped that they were both from different cultures. “The acceptance is a lot more when it’s like that.”
And as a director, Elan made sure the film stayed relevant. “I knew the edit needed to be crisp and that it needed to be an easy watch. It was a decision I made to make it work among the younger generations.”
Given how it’s also a film about two big families, as much as it is about one couple, there were also a lot of characters to think about. The film also features Radikaa Sarathkumar, Geetha Kailasam, and Senthil in important roles. “That was something Elan and I were sure about, right from day one. It’s the combined realisation of several people and how they must change to accommodate a new person. Outside of the primary characters, we were just as excited working on their friends, grannies and even their pets.”
What mattered just as much is the middle-class backgrounds of both families. “If a marriage is rocky, especially for people like us, it has a way of affecting everyone in their extended family,” Nivedita adds. “That impact is something we felt we could explore in such a film. Every Indian marriage is also a marriage between two families, no?”