Back in the late 1970s, even after the Tamil film screens had started dazzling in colour, there were a few directors who stuck to black-and-white to create celluloid poetry, playing on shadows and profound imagery. It was that cusp of a period that saw an avant-garde Tamil movie, Aval Appadithan (She is just like that), hitting the screen to critical acclaim and capturing the imagination of the average movie-goer in Tamil Nadu. The fame that its director C Rudhraiya earned was so much that, despite having moved away from Kollywood 34 years ago, he is remembered after his death on Tuesday night.
For, the impact made on the collective conscience of the Tamil film audience in 1978 was so much that it looked as though Kollywood had come of age. It raised hopes of the standards of Tamil films improving, which ironically did not happen with even Rudhraiya’s second film, Gramathu Athiyayam, that hit the screens two years later.
Though Rudhraiya walked out of Kollywood after the second film, a village saga, flopped, and even most industry people lost track of him, Aval Appadithan continued to be talked about and IBN Live even included it as one of the great 100 Indian films ever made.
Apart from the stylised manner in which the film was made, it had searing dialogues that rang in the ears of the audience even after leaving the movie hall. ‘I would not have felt bad if he had called me a prostitute but he called me sister’, the lead lady of the film, Sripriya, would recall the words of her lover when he dumped her after catching up some intimate moments with her.
It was perhaps a woman-oriented story that had two leading male characters — one role played by Rajnikanth and the other by Kamal Hassan — of contrasting world views about women, temperament, attitudes and lifestyle. Interestingly, both are friends, and their conversations are typical locker room dialogues that have a ring of reality to them.
The film that dealt with issues like feminism, women’s liberation and male chauvinism was ahead of its times. But then, that was the time when Tamil cinema itself was showing signs of change with many directors like Balu Mahendra, Mahendran and Bharathiraja having joined the industry with new ideas to experiment and make a mark.
Though the other directors stayed back to take more quality films, Rudhraiya left the industry 34 years ago, and this world on Tuesday night. He was 67 and is survived by wife, a son and a daughter.