Two sisters: one reserved and fatalistic, the other feisty and impulsive. They lose their ancestral house, social status, romantic partners. Through courage and graceful compromise, they rediscover love and happiness. Of the many adaptations of Jane Austen’s 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility, Rajiv Menon’s Tamil-language Kandukondain Kandukondain (I Have Found It) is one of the most memorable.
Released 25 years ago, the beautifully performed drama balances ardour with heartbreak, poignancy with humour, wisdom with lightness. AR Rahman’s outstanding songs provide the necessary punctuation to the narrative, with Vairamuthu’s lyrics capturing the ebbs and flows of passion.
The movie follows the journeys of software programmer Somwya (Tabu) and singer Meenakshi (Aishwarya Rai). Bad timing and misunderstandings estrange Somwya from Manohar (Ajith). Meenakshi falls for the slippery Srikanth (Abbas), ignoring the better man Bala (Mammootty). When the siblings lose their inheritance, they move to Chennai with their mother (Srividya) and youngest sister (Shamili), where they reinvent themselves and find what they had been looking for.
Shot by Ravi K Chandran, with dialogue by the legendary writer Sujatha, Kandukondain Kandukondain smoothly transposes nineteenth-century England to millennial Tamil Nadu. The plot is driven by the actions and decisions of its heroines – both of whom are working women – which was rare in 2000 and unusual even now.
A reputed cinematographer, Menon’s first film as director was Minsara Kanavu (1997), starring Kajol, Arvind Swami and Prabhudeva. Although its Hindi version Sapnay didn’t fly, Menon did consider making his next film in Hindi. Instead, Menon stuck to the linguistic and cultural integrity of Kandukondain Kandukondain, delivering an enduring Tamil entertainer that resonates with non-Tamil audiences too.
In a conversation with Scroll, Menon looked back on the origin, creative choices and legacy of Kandukondain Kandukondain. Here are edited excerpts from the interview.
Kandukondain Kandukondain was shown with English subtitles outside Tamil Nadu. Were you thinking of a Hindi version too?
Mani Ratnam’s Roja had been a huge success after being dubbed, it was later followed by Bombay. AR Rahman had become a national phenomenon. But there were also a couple of big duds – basically films riding on AR’s music.
Minsara Kanavu was unsuccessfully dubbed in Hindi. It was a light comedy with Chennai humour. Most people couldn’t connect with the fact that the South Indian best-husband face played by Arvind Swami doesn’t get Kajol.
I needed a universal subject. I cast Aishwarya and Tabu because there was the opportunity to make the film in Hindi. But as the script progressed, the poetry increased, which made it impossible to dub the film. Meenakshi is a dreamer, a poetic kind of person, so Subramania Bharathi’s poetry started coming in.
We were using Tamil Nadu’s greatest poet in his full glory. I didn’t want to spoil the lyric or the speech. It would have been like converting Mirza Ghalib into Tamil.
I told Tabu and Aishwarya that I was going to make the film only in Tamil – I had it written into the contracts that we would not make the movie in Hindi.
What made Sense and Sensibility a good fit for a story set in Tamil Nadu?
The basic idea is about two women looking at life and love. Their family’s misfortunes affect their dreams.
The characters are conflicted between aspiration and reality. They have weaknesses and chinks in their armour. When they come into conflict with a difficult situation and suffer, audiences can connect with them.
There is no villain as such. Circumstance is a bigger villain than any individual.
I didn’t want an Anglicised version of the book. Great novels have hidden truths. The rule of adaptation is to understand what the character’s needs are and how you can take these into a completely different scenario, a modern context.
I had also tried to adapt Pride and Prejudice, but I didn’t find tightness in it. Sense and Sensibility is tight. In terms of cinematic writing, you need polar opposites, and the story is full of it.
The rural versus urban element has always been strong in Indian cinema. While the love story was interesting, the story of a wealthy family being disinherited and moving to the city resonated here too. That sense of losing and finding your abode somewhere else is a recurring motif even in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
In the 2000s, the software industry was beginning to take off. Women were getting into the work force in big numbers. There was a sense that if you came to the city, you could escape patriarchy and caste in a new knowledge economy. Through Abbas’s character, we were exploring the financial scams of the time.
The film hasn’t aged because of the story, the characters, the music and the mood it was able to create, and a contemporary style of shooting. The film has outlived its shelf life.
It’s unusual for a mainstream movie to be driven by female characters who think for themselves and hold down jobs. Even today, the “female-oriented film” is anathema.
When the ancestral house is offered back to the sisters, they reject it. The house is a feudal relic. Why go back to a patriarchal order? The heroes are not alpha males either. They are down in the dumps.
A lot of people said that if the same story was made about two brothers, it would have been better. But another section said, wow, this is really nice.
Music and education were the saviours for my own family, and you see these two things in the film. I have seen what my mother [the renowned singer Kalyani Menon] went through when she became a widow at 37. My father, Commander KK Menon, was only 41 when he died.
I have seen what education does to women. My paternal grandmother had a child only when she was 35 years old. She was one of the first people to do a BA and a BEd in 1928 at Lady Wellington Institute in Chennai. My mother’s mother was a physics teacher. My mother single-mindedly pursued music.
I am surrounded by strong women – there’s my wife and my two daughters. Perhaps that’s why I have this perspective.
Although led by Sowmya and Meenakshi, Kandukondain Kandukondain opens with Mammooty’s Bala as an Indian Peace Keeping Force in war-torn Sri Lanka, where he loses his leg in a bomb blast.
This approach hasn’t been taken even in the Western adaptations. What appears to be an action scene is turned into a sequence in which a principal character loses a limb and experiences post-traumatic stress disorder.
During the IPKF operation in Sri Lanka, I met a para-commando who was on a break. He told me about how difficult the operation was, how many casualties there were. It was like India’s Vietnam.
We exchanged numbers. Within a few days, I got a call from a military hospital. The soldier wanted to meet me. He had been seriously injured in a landmine blast, while his buddy had lost his leg. This stuck in my head.
When we do meet Sowmya and Meenakshi, they are swimming in a pond, like fish.
We initially thought that the women could be cycling, but Aishwarya couldn’t cycle at the time.
We found a pond attached to a house in Kerala. The women were like nymphs coming out. The scene introduces the water motif, which will be associated with Meenakshi throughout. For Somwya, we evoked dryness and the sun and scorching sand through the song Enna Solla Pogirai.
I borrowed the idea of mixing locations from Bombay. In that film, the Muslim wedding takes place in the Thirumalai Nayakkar Mahal in Madurai. The boats carrying the leads are crossing in Kasargod. Their houses are in Pollachi. The fort in the song Uyire is in Bekal. You could bring all these things together and convince people that it was a magical land.
Sowmya’s flat was actually my own flat in Chennai. The ancestral house was in Karaikudi. For the title song, you cut away to Scotland. It also sort of links up to the source material and the period setting of the novel.
The film has unusual casting choices. What made you cast Tabu and Aishwarya Rai?
Tabu excels in showing hurt and pathos with a great deal of dignity. She can convey that dual sense of dignity under difficult circumstances. She had done something like this to an extent in Kaalapaani. You could feel that inner pathos in Maachis too.
Aishwarya was a bolt from the blue. I wanted a feisty woman who was ready to spar and state her point and be impulsive.
I was seriously pursuing Manju Warrier for Meenakshi. I even tried Soundarya. I had met Aishwarya while making commercials. She was even suggested by Minsara Kanavu’s producer AVM as the heroine before Kajol.
By the time I got around to making Minsara Kanavu, Aishwarya had received a call from Mani Ratnam’s officer for Iruvar. I told her that she should work with Mani Ratnam, because while I didn’t know how I would make Minsara Kanavu, Mani would direct Iruvar well.
A few years later, I was working on Kandukondain Kandukondain and was trying to cast for Meenakshi’s role. My wife Latha said, why don’t you try Aishwarya, she can do this, she has something inside her.
When you first see Manohar, he is part of a crowded film unit, and is crouched on the ground. It’s hardly the heroic introduction that Ajith is used to.
Ajith had had a back surgery, and he was at Apollo Hospital. He heard the script and said, there are so many characters. But when I started talking about the struggle of an assistant director who has the balls to say fuck off to his parents, something connected with Ajith. He too had struggled as a model for some time.
He’s a very good-looking chap, but there’s something casual about his handsomeness. When he is showing hurt or defeat or pain, he’s believable.
The vulnerable side is what every hero needs. If you have well-defined roles with strong emotional arcs, actors will do them.
Manohar’s track pokes good-natured fun at the Tamil film industry. Did you channelise your pet peeves through Manohar’s struggle to direct his own movie?
The film industry was changing at the time. A lot of young and more casually dressed people were coming in. There was resentment between the old and new schools.
The traditional star system was collapsing. Producers didn’t know what to do with young actors. A lot of people were struggling to make films.
A director’s window is short. Lives get stalled, romance and marriages are stalled. Everything goes into freeze mode, because how long can people wait?
Your films are music-heavy, with attention paid to the filming of songs. In Kandukondain Kandukondain, some of the songs are situation-based while others are fantasies. They have been imaginatively choreographed too.
The way you shoot a song creates a shelf life for the song outside the film. The visual seduction, the romance survive in people’s minds because of the songs. Few romances survive because of dialogue.
The visual design for a song isn’t just about a dance or a hook step, but about setting it up. For instance, in Kannamoochi, Meenakshi is singing about her sister’s love while talking about Krishna – like a sakhi from Vaishnava poetry.
The song is like a mini-scene of visual excitement. It a rasa that you enjoy separately. You have to get into the song and then get back into the story.
S Rangarajan, better known by his pseudonym Sujatha, wrote Kandukondain Kandukondain’s dialogue. Apart from fiction, plays and poetry, he wrote numerous Tamil film from the 1970s until his demise in 2008. What was he like to work with?
He was this incredible chap who knew so much and treated you like a friend.
Sujatha changed the way popular Tamil was written, whether in his own writing or in films. His staccato style was very different from the theatrical, flowery Tamil. He wrote modern, accessible spoken Tamil but was also completely knowledgeable about old Tamil and its history.
He was computer-savvy. He was working with Bharat Electronics Limited on the design of electronic voting machines. He wrote science fiction. He could bring out feelings brutally and concisely. He never wrote a word more than necessary – and he didn’t resort to profanity.
For instance, the scene between Bala and Meenakshi in the end, when she tells him that she loves him and he hugs her. In the edit, it felt like Bala had hugged Meenakshi too easily. The sequence was re-shot after three months and the dialogue was re-written.
Now, there is a pause before Bala accepts Meenakshi. He talks about the spiritual aspects of everything that has happened to him – why he suffered only so that he could cherish the beautiful thing that was waiting to happen. Initially, he doesn’t even touch Meenakshi’s face.
It’s not just about information but how you give the information. The information is that Bala and Meenakshi have come together, but it’s about emotional acceptance – he is a proud and honest man and isn’t going to latch on to some woman because of her misfortune. He has to believe that spiritually, they are fated together.
You have been acting in films of late, most recently in Vetri Maaran’s Viduthalai. Why didn’t you take the plunge earlier?
Mani Ratnam had approached me for Roja for the role played by Arvind Swami, but I didn’t want to act at the time.
We had friends in common. Suhasini [Mani Ratnam’s wife] was my senior at the Madras Film Institute. She too had approached me to act.
What I told Mani was: your wife was a good cinematographer, whose practical exercises in colour used to be shown to us at the film institute. She could have been a good cinematographer, but once her acting career took off, the cinematographer in her died. I worried that this would happen to me too.
I had done nothing to look the way I looked, it was inherited. But I had done a lot of work as a cinematographer, and I wanted to be successful.
I got together with Mani to shoot Bombay. When the casting was taking place, he again asked me to play the hero. Santosh Sivan shot a test, of the scene in which Manisha’s character comes to her husband and tells him that she has received a letter from her family. But it didn’t work out.
After Viduthalai, Mani told me, I gave you a hero’s role, but you have played a grandfatherly figure in that film.
Also read:
Audio master: Every AR Rahman song in ‘Kandukondain Kandukondain’ reflects the film’s many moods
