I strongly believe that this is something Hollywood could learn from the approach here, in Japan and often in the UK (at least for social realist films). I’m sure some of it must come from sensitive direction, but the institutional apparatus of casting and preparing children for auditions must be important too. She then quite naturally became a high profile character on the shoot. In the brief intro to the film as screened on Channel 4, Mani Ratnam described how he looked at many girls but chose Keerthana even though she had no experience (but her parents did). In many ways, Ratnam achieves what the best Hollywood directors often managed in the studio period – the creation of heroic characters who were in one sense ‘just like us’ and in another ‘able to do impossible things’.īut for this story to work, the child actor playing the child Amudha has to be perfect and Keerthana is. They have children who wet the bed and squabble, a grandfather and in-laws who behave normally and they live in a recognisable community. The trick is to have this middle class couple played by attractive stars, but to create a mise en scène which doesn’t turn them into fantasy creatures. Mother is played by Simran, who I haven’t seen before, but who I thought very impressive. Madhavan is a likable presence and I think he plays the role well.
So far, so glamorous and the father is played by Madhavan, Mani Ratnam’s discovery from TV who has become both a Tamil and Hindi star.
She is a morning newscaster on a Chennai TV station. But his wife is no stay at home housewife. Father is a production line engineer who conveniently has plenty of spare time to write short stories (using his wife’s name, ‘Indira’, as a pseudonym). The adoptive couple are middle class with the resources to do things. How does he do it? First, it is important to recognise that he has a conventional popular narrative approach.
But Mani Ratnam knows how to handle it, as he had already demonstrated with Bombay (1995), set amidst communal violence. The combination of an emotional struggle within a family and an attempted reunion literally in the midst of guerilla war is potentially overwhelming. The trip from Chennai to Northern Sri Lanka is much shorter, but much more dangerous. Mani Ratnam reportedly based the story on the experience of American parents taking their adopted daughter back to the Philippines to meet her mother.
The couple then decide to tell the child about the adoption on her ninth birthday. Kannathil Muthamittal tells the story of a child born in a refugee camp for Sri Lankan Tamils in India and subsequently adopted by an engineer/writer who marries the girl next door in order to qualify as an adoptive father. I use the scare quotes to emphasise that Ratnam’s world is not a simple reflection of reality (which we all know is impossible on film) but that his construction of reality does draw on the experiences of families living in a recognisable world. By contrast, Mani Ratnam’s Tamil films deal with real social issues set in ‘real’ environments. The cliché is that Bollywood represents a fantasy India constructed just for the vicarious entertainment of the cinema audience. When I watch the Tamil films, I really do wonder why anyone bothers to watch the majority of Bollywood films. Although my experience of Mani Ratnam’s work is limited, I’m reasonably confident in asserting that his films shot in the South are better than those made elsewhere in India. The other was Alai Payuthey (2000), one of my favourite films that I have watched several times.
Kannathil Muthamittal ( A Peck on the Cheek) is one of two films made back in Tamil Nadu by Mani Ratnam after his Hindi experience with Dil Se.
The summer is a chance to watch some of my archive of videotapes and transfer those worth using to DVD. Simran made a comeback in the film industry with the film 'Petta' with Rajinikanth.Keerthana and Simran as adopted daughter and her legal mother Madhavan considers this one of the biggest films of his career. Nambi Narayanan's work would have been a massive scientific and economic boost for India and ISRO. The film spans across Nambi Narayanan's days as a graduate student at Princeton University, before exploring his work as a scientist and the false espionage charges placed upon him. The film 'Rocketry: The Nambi Effect' is directed by R Madhavan who also essays the lead role as Nambi Narayanan and will be shot simultaneously in Hindi, Tamil and English, with the Tamil version titled as 'Rocketry: Nambi Vilaivu'. Their chemistry was well received by the audience and critics alike. Thiru and Indira are characters played by Madhavan and Simran respectively in critically and commercially acclaimed film 'Kannathil Muthamittal'. ????#rocketryfilm #actormaddy #rocketrythenambieffect #15yearslater post shared by R.