'Love Marriage' Movie Review: Vikram Prabhu In A Loveless Marriage Of Comedy And COVID 

The core plot of Shanmuga Priyan’s Love Marriage surely deserved a better film. Like Sooraj Barjatya’s Vivah (2006), Love Marriage too is written around the various stages between engagement, marriage and the relationships that form or get broken along the way. The engagement is said to take place between Ram (Vikram Prabhu) and Ambika (Sushmitha Bhat), and we get the feeling that they’re being forced to get married, just hours after they first meet each other.

From a distance, it appears to be a film that romanticises the concept of an arranged marriage. In one place, we’re told that both Ram and Ambika belong to different castes, but their getting together isn’t an issue for their elders because they both belong to similar class groups in the hierarchy. However, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be an entirely smooth ride for Ram and Ambika. 

In a sense, Love Marriage is the sort of romance in which the conflict within the lead couple is as strong as the external conflicts they need to battle together. So, it’s not just that both Ram and Ambika need to figure out if they like each other, but they also have to do this while both their families live in the same house, in a remote village, with limited resources, for several weeks, right at the start of the first COVID-19 lockdown. 

It’s the sort of zone in which a director like Sundar C would have thrived. But in Love Marriage, the plot points are amusing, but only as ideas, and not because the characters are interesting or have been executed with craft. Take the instance of a handful of characters. One of these includes the stereotypical uncle who has an issue with everything; his character is designed to create problems between the two families for narrative tension. But right through the film, we only know as much about him as we learn within the first two minutes of his introduction. He never comes across as a real person as much as an archetype.

The same applies to almost all the characters in Love Marriage. Even the romantic scenes deserved to play out with more chemistry for us to feel the awkwardness of their strange plight. Instead, they just seem like two people reading out their lines, focused only on looking the part. 

Imagine how funny it should have been to see a young couple trying to find a minute to speak to each other when they’re living in the same tiny house with both their families constantly watching. Yet not one scene comes with any spark. Just as a scene begins, you can hear yourself narrating the exact dialogue the characters are going to be mouthing and the exact order in which it’s going to unfold, giving you the feeling that you’re watching the first draft of a screenplay that got made into a movie too soon.

The larger ideas never fully click into place after that, and even when the film tries to surprise you with the writing, it comes across as too forced to buy into. So, when the film abandons Vivaah to enter Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994) territory, we feel exhausted with the lack of focus. And when Love Marriage throws in an inexplicable Sathyaraj cameo and a fight scene that pops out of nowhere, nightmares of the lockdown begin to hit you, making you feel stuck, trapped and in desperate need to get out.