General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Aval Appadithan (அவள் அப்படித்தான்)

Aval Appadithan (அவள் அப்படித்தான்; also known in English as She Is Like That) is a 1978 Indian Tamil-language black-and-white drama film directed and produced by C. Rudhraiya, starring Sripriya as Manju, Kamal Haasan as the documentary filmmaker Arun, and Rajinikanth as the advertising-agency boss Thyagu¹. Released on 30 October 1978, the Deepavali holiday, the film was a commercial failure at first but later became a cult classic, and it is now regarded as a landmark of feminist themes and modernist technique in Tamil cinema²^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Release	30 October 1978 (Deepavali), India; runtime 114 minutes; black and white⁴^•¹
Director	C. Rudhraiya, in his directorial debut; he also produced the film⁵
Cast	Sripriya (Manju), Kamal Haasan (Arun), Rajinikanth (Thyagu), Sivachandran (Mano), Saritha (Arun's wife)¹
Music	Ilaiyaraaja; three songs, with lyrics by Kannadasan and Gangai Amaran⁶
Awards	Second prize for Best Film at the 1978 Tamil Nadu State Film Awards; cinematography award for Nallusamy and M. N. Gnanashekaran; special prize for actress Sripriya⁷
Reception	IMDb rating 8.1/10 from 355 votes¹

Spoilers

Plot

Manju (Sripriya) works at an advertising agency run by Thyagu (Rajinikanth), an arrogant, money-minded male chauvinist. She is assigned to help Arun (Kamal Haasan), a sensitive filmmaker from Coimbatore who has come to Madras to make a documentary on the lives of women from different backgrounds⁸. As they work together, Manju tells Arun about her past: she was molested by her uncle, her first college relationship ended when her lover left her to marry another woman for the sake of employment, and her second love, Mano, used her and abandoned her. These experiences made her distrustful of men⁹.

Arun falls in love with her, but when office staff and Thyagu comment on her character, Manju resigns. She then appears to court Thyagu, devastating Arun, who sees her as opportunistic and fickle. In truth she is baiting Thyagu to teach him a lesson: when he tries to take advantage of her at a party banquet, she rebukes and slaps him⁴. The revelation comes too late; Arun, disillusioned, has already married a small-town girl (Saritha). In the final scene, Manju asks Arun's wife what she thinks of women's liberation; the wife says she does not know, and Manju replies cynically that this is why she is happy. A voice-over closes the film: "She died today. She will be reborn tomorrow. She will die again. She will be reborn again. That's how she is"¹.

Production

Rudhraiya, a graduate of the Madras Film Institute who had worked as an assistant to K. Balachander, made Aval Appadithan his first film¹⁰. It was dedicated to the writer and director Ananthu and was produced by Raga Manjari together with students of Chennai's MGR Government Film and Television Training Institute, their first such effort and the first time a student of the Institute had directed a film¹¹. The screenplay was written by Rudhraiya with Vanna Nilavan and Somasundareshwar, and the film was written by Ananthu and K. Rajeshwar¹¹^•¹.

The film was shot in black and white at a time when most releases that year were in color; the cinematographers later said this was done for economic reasons, though it became one of the film's defining features¹². It made extensive use of jump cuts, close-ups, natural lighting, and silhouettes, techniques a Tamil film had not used this way before, and it contained numerous English dialogues¹²^•⁶. Ilaiyaraaja composed the score; the three songs include "Uravugal Thodarkathai", sung by K. J. Yesudas, "Vazhkkai Odam" by S. Janaki, and "Paneer Pushpangale", written by Gangai Amaran and sung by Kamal Haasan himself⁶^•¹³.

Reception and legacy

The film opened on Deepavali 1978 in only two theaters in Chennai, Sabayar and Kamadhenu, and failed to find an audience⁷. After positive reviews from the director Bharathiraja and the filmmaker Mrinal Sen, it drew new attention from film lovers and eventually crossed 100 days in theaters²^•¹⁰. At the 1978 Tamil Nadu State Film Awards it won the second prize for Best Film, the cinematography award for Nallusamy and Gnanashekaran, and a special prize for Sripriya⁷.

Film scholarship places the film at a turning point. Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, a professor at Michigan State University, groups Aval Appadithan with Agraharathil Kazhuthai (1978), 16 Vayathiniley (1977), and Uthirippookkal (1979) as films marked by ambiguous and dark protagonists, avoidance of clichéd and cathartic closures, experiments in cinematography and editing, and location shooting, which signaled the transition of Tamil cinema from the classical studio period to the post-classical³. The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema describes its collaboration between the modernist writer Vannamala and Rudhraiya as an early engagement with the "independent woman" motif in South India, noting its mix of flashbacks, vox-pop interviews with students and women workers about the status of women, and glossy pictorialism¹⁴. The film's Rajinikanth role is atypical for the star: Thyagu is complex, flawed, and unapologetically outspoken rather than heroic, and his conversations with Arun about love, marriage, and women remain among the film's most debated scenes².

Rudhraiya directed only one more film, Gramathu Adhyayam (1980), and died in Chennai in November 2014 at the age of 67¹⁰.

Copyright dispute over production stills

An album of photographs taken during the making of the film went missing after Rudraiah's death in 2014 and later surfaced on the website of The Cinema Resource Centre, a Chennai-based film archive trust. The trust said it had bought the photographs in 2007 from a dealer at Moore Market, Chennai, in sacks of old film material, and had restored, digitized, and cataloged them at its own expense¹⁵.

Rudraiah's daughter and son sued for a declaration of copyright, return of the photographs, and an injunction. A Single Judge ruled for them in 2021, and on 27 August 2026 a Division Bench of the Madras High Court, Justices P. Velmurugan and K. Govindarajan Thilakavadi, dismissed the archive's appeal. The court held that copyright in the photographs vested in Rudraiah as the producer who engaged the photographers, and devolved on his children, and that physical possession of a photograph and ownership of copyright in it are two different matters¹⁵.

Availability and remake

The film has circulated on streaming platforms intermittently: it streamed on Sony Liv from December 2018 to September 2020, MX Player from January 2022 to October 2023, aha from February to March 2023, and VI movies and tv from August 2022 to September 2024, and it was unavailable for streaming in India as of the most recent listings⁸. In 2020 the director Badri Venkatesh announced a remake with Shruti Haasan, Kamal Haasan's daughter, in Sripriya's role, and said he hoped to cast Dulquer Salmaan in Kamal Haasan's part; he reported difficulty establishing who held the remake rights after Rudhraiya's death⁵^•¹⁶.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Indian films (individual works) › Tamil films before 2000 › Released 1952 to 1991

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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