Aval Appadithan

aka She Is Like That 1978 114’ b&w Tamil d/st/co-sc C. Rudraiah p Ragamanjari pc Kumar Arts dial Vannanilavan, Somasundareshwar lyr Kannadasan, Gangai Amaran c Nallusamy, Gnanasekharan m Ilaiyaraja lp Kamalahasan, Rajnikant, Sripriya, Sivachandran, Indrani, S.R. Rajkumari, Nalini

A cautionary tale about an independently minded woman, Manju (Sripriya), who works in advertising for a male chauvinist boss (Rajnikant). Weary of men, she keeps her distance from her sensitive boyfriend Arun (Kamalahasan), who makes vox-pop documentaries. Arun eventually accepts an arranged marriage and Manju declares her love for him when it is too late. The film leaves her a lonely figure on Madras’s Marina beach. The collaboration between modernist writer Vannanilavan and Rudraiah, a graduate from the Madras Film Institute, is an early engagement with the ‘independent woman’ motif in South India. The music and the fluid narrative style mixes flashbacks with vox-pop (students and women workers interviewed about the status of women) and glossy pictorialism. Godard’s Deux ou troix choses que je sais d’elle (1966) could be a distant ancestor of this film.

Film