Sunday, March 23, 2014

Kandukondain Kandukondain (2000)

This was one of the first Indian movies I ever watched and seven years later, I think I enjoy it as much as I did then. Tabu and Aishwarya Rai are fantastic and so are the songs. The whole thing is just delightful.


I'm reasonably certain that my best friend and I spent an entire semester Konjum Mainakkale-ing around our college dorm just like this.

Yeah, probably spent a lot of time badly imitating this one too.


This is a Tamil riff on Sense and Sensibility with some nice updates like both sisters holding jobs and being successful. Really, Marianne’s character is made to be an Indian movie heroine, with her hyperactive romantic ideas and tendency to wander around in the rain thinking of her true love, and Aishwarya as Meenakshi is as beautiful, impulsive and poetry-loving as you might wish for. Sowmya (Tabu) is great as the more restrained and responsible older sister, and the friendship between them, despite their differences, is very sweet.


Sowmya meets aspiring director Manohar (Ajith Kumar) and they’re both very awkward and cute, but he bravely confesses his love ASAP although he has to prove himself by directing his first movie before he can marry. Meenakshi meets Major Bala (Mammootty) when he causes a drunken scene at her dance performance. For him, it’s love at first sight and he promptly gifts her classical music lessons and quits drinking. For her, he’s a mild annoyance after she meets Srikanth (Abbas) who comes striding out of a storm reciting poetry to rescue her from a twisted ankle. He, of course is a self-centered owner of a scammy investment bank and you know the rest of the story from there.


The family is kicked out of their palatial home for inheritance reasons and have to struggle in Madras. Major Bala helps Meenakshi get work singing and Sowmya works her way up from receptionist to software programmer and even secures a visa to the US when she thinks Manohar no longer loves her. It won’t be a spoiler to say it all turns out well. It’s all very cute.

Bala is not quite sure what to do with Meenakshi now that he's got her.


And no review of this movie would be complete without the title song, where Aishwarya dances around a drafty Scottish castle in a skimpy bobbled sari as her lover arrives in a long flowing cape. (The subtitles are not the best, but in searching for a better video I instead found this adorable Kandukondain/Free Fallin' mashup that I feel the need to share.)

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