Shubh Mangal Saavdhan directed by RS Prasanna stars Ayushmaan Khurrana and Bhumi Pednekar.
Ayushmaan Khurrana and Bhumi Pednekar will share screen space once again in upcoming romantic comedy Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, which as the title suggests is a take on marriages in India and how something which by definition aims to solemnise a relationship often ends up messing it up. And as the trailer shows, at the core of this chaos of an arranged marriage is an internal problem the couple is battling, something extremely natural but only addressed in hushed tones – Ayushmaan’s Mudit suffers from erectile dysfunction.
Shubh Mangal Saavdhan is directed by Tamil filmmaker RS Prasanna. The film is a remake of Prasanna’s 2013 Tamil romantic-comedy Kalyana Samayal Saadham. While the original was also penned by Prasanna, the Hindi version is written by Hitesh Kewalaya.
Talking to media today at the trailer launch of the film, Prasanna shared that the inception of the Tamil version took place during his own wedding, when he saw the elders in his family suddenly showing interest in his after marriage sex life. The director said that it was then he realised that sex, in conversations might be a taboo, but its importance is known to all.
“The germ of this concept came when I got married. I was about to get married to my girlfriend of four years. Just a day before our wedding, suddenly my uncles, aunts and everybody who I respected and hid adult stuff from, they all started coming to me and starting talking about adult stuff. I remember my uncles, aunties saying that now you will have a lot of scented candles. So, that was the germ of the idea that in India, we do talk about sex and we have lot of sex. We just don’t talk about it, that’s all,” Prasanna said.
The filmmaker went on to add that he understood the real impact of Kalyana Samayal Saadham when he started getting mails from the film’s viewers, including one where a guy confessed his marriage ended due to sexual difficulties. For Prasanna, this was proof that the sexual dysfunction is a serious issue.
“After I made this film in Tamil, I got a lot of people writing back to me and that’s when I realised that yes we have used the vehicle of comedy to reach out to people but actually, this is a serious problem. The seriousness is not the problem, like we have treated it as Mudit has got a headache or a fractured leg. At the end of the day, it’s a physical problem. But I have got letters and mails where people told me, ‘Sir, I watched your film and I was moved to tears because my marriage broke up because of this. There are so many problems related to sex we don’t talk about.”
Shubh Mangal Saavdhan releases on September 1.
