Kannathil Muthamittal

Film: Kannathil Muthamittal (A Peck on the Cheek) (2002)
Language: Tamil
Streaming on Netflix

I've had this movie sitting in my queue for almost a year, and I finally decided it was time to watch it. As you can see it, it really is not a Bollywood film, but a Tamil film (I'm not sure what they call the southern Indian film industry?) I've seen "Tollywood" and "Kollywood". Ok, I just looked it up. Tollywood = Telugu films, Kollywood = Tamil films. The film industry outside of Bollywood is entertaining for the fact it's clearly lower budget, but anyway... Tamil is interesting because it definitely is different from Hindi. It seems more sing-song in my opinion - very pretty.

This film was directed by Mani Ratnam, who next to Karan Johar (kuch kuch hota hai, K3G, KANK, MNIK), is the only name I'm familiar with as far as Indian directors go. He did Dil Se, Yuuva, Guru, and now Raavan. So I knew this film would be visually appealing, and it definitely was. Also, A.R. Rahman did the score/music and he can do no wrong in my eyes.

Synopsis: The movie starts off in Sri Lanka with a man and woman getting married, but their happiness is disrupted by the fight with the Tamil Tigers. Fast forward time, there's a family in Chennai with a engineer/famous author father, mother and 3 kids: 1 girl and 2 boys. The girl's 9th birthday comes up and the parents decide to tell her that she's not their biological child, that she's adopted. This sets off her obsession to try and find her biological mother and finally her parents agree (after she runs away twice) to go with her to try and find her. The warring Tamils & Sri Lankans make things chaotic during this journey and is a bit of an eye-opening experience to the girl.

The Good
+ The first song is kind of silly, but the rest of the music is really good. Again, A.R. Rahman can do no wrong
+ Excellent acting by everyone
+ Different storyline from what I've mostly seen
+ The different viewpoints. Again, alot of Bollywood is told from a male perspective, and even though they have that here, I'd say a good 50% is from the child's POV

The Bad
+ the subtitles were kind of off. Sometimes they'd be slow, or obviously they had left out subbing something. There was 1 song where they didn't bother to subtitle at all, which I thought was weird. But it was never enough to where I felt like I lost meaning or didn't know what was going on

Final Thoughts: Was it worth watching? Yes! I thought the storyline was really well done, all the acting was excellent, and liked how they spliced storylines nicely (biological parents history, girl's story, and adoptive parents history). I never felt like the movie got too over dramatic either.

Rating: 4/5

Random thoughts: The actor Madhavan (who is totally hot, by the way!), is apparently well known in Kollywood, and has done a few Hindi films that are well known: Rang de Basti, Guru, and 3 Idiots. It took me a while to make the connection that he was in 3 Idiots, and then I found it hilarious because the 3 idiots, who were college kids, were played by much older actors. (Madhaven who had to be about 39ish during filming, Aamir Khan is in his 40's, and Sharman Joshi is in his early 30's)

Favorite Song Kannathil Muthamittal