Fred & Ginger Part 1: Flying Down To Rio and The Gay Divorcee

You may think you remember what a typical Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie is like. There's initial antagonism—they meet cute, but while he's instantly smitten, she is unimpressed. He pursues her; she rebuffs him, but eventually acquiesces to a dance. As they move in a sweeping, fluid duet to a gorgeously romantic song, now a standard, that was written for them—Irving Berlin's "Let's Face the Music and Dance," say, or "Cheek to Cheek"—she finds herself falling in love with this odd-looking but beautifully graceful man. Their courtship dance is observed, aided and impeded by a cast of comic supporting actors which include Edward Everett Horton (a continually exasperated best friend), Eric Blore (a fey waiter or valet), and Eric Rhodes (a vain foreign competitor for Ginger). All the characters move in a world of elegant cafés, resort hotels, tuxedos and evening gowns—and this at the height of the Depression.

So it was a bit of a shock to discover, as we began to re-watch the eight 1930s Astaire-Rogers comedies for RKO Pictures (excluding the musical biopic The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939)), that only two of their first five movies together actually conform to this model. And it's also surprising how contingent the beginning of their partnership seems. One of the greatest dance pairings of the 20th century came together as a matter of chance (which, as we will learn in their second film together, The Gay Divorcée (1934), "is just the fool's name for fate"). Fred was famously (if perhaps apocryphally) screen-tested and found wanting: "Can't sing. Can't act. Balding. Can dance a little." Ginger was the better-known and more experienced movie actor, but she had mainly played supporting roles as a wisecracking chorus girl. In two of their first three films together Astaire and Rogers are not even the top-billed stars. But as Katherine Hepburn famously (if perhaps apocryphally) said of them, "He gave her class, and she gave him sex."

1. Flying Down to Rio (1933): But neither class nor sex is much apparent in their first film together, which barely qualifies as an Astaire-Rogers film. She's fourth-billed, he's fifth, and they have only one brief number together. But they provide the only sparks of interest in a plot that seems like it was thrown together over lunch on the first day of shooting. Dolores Del Rio is a sultry Latin bombshell who so bewitches blond bandleader Gene Raymond that he follows her with his entire orchestra down to Rio de Janiero. Raymond wins the girl and rescues her father's hotel (which has been denied an entertainment license) by—of course!—strapping dozens of dancing girls to the wings of airplanes and executing a Busby Berkeley-style aerial production number over the beach.

Ginger plays Honey Hale, the singer in Raymond's orchestra, and Fred is Fred Ayres, Raymond's accordion player/assistant conductor/sidekick. They don't take the floor together until midway through the film during the novelty dance number "The Carioca" (music by Vincent Youmans; lyrics by Edward Eliscu and Gus Kahn). As the lyrics have it, "it's not a foxtrot or a polka," but rather an odd dance in which the partners touch foreheads while executing a complicated tango step. Not even Fred and Ginger can make this look graceful, and at one point they make a joke of it by knocking their heads together and then staggering around the dance floor as if dazed. You'll feel a bit dazed, too, if you watch this movie, which is for Fred and Ginger completists only:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1oYTVzmx_0

According to Arlene Croce's The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book (Outerbridge & Lazard, 1972), Ginger wasn't even originally cast in Flying Down to Rio: "Rogers might not have been in the film at all if Dorothy Jordan, who had been cast, hadn't decided to marry Merian C. Cooper, the head of the studio, and go off on a honeymoon rather than dance with Fred Astaire" (p. 25). Fortunately for all of us, Ginger seized that chance, and it led to star billing in their next film together.

2. The Gay Divorcée (1934) was based on a Cole Porter stage musical, The Gay Divorce (1932), which was Fred Astaire's first (and final) Broadway hit without his partner and sister Adele; after its success, he went to Hollywood. In the transition from stage to film, many things were lost, including most of Porter's songs ("Night and Day" was the only survivor), but a few things were retained, including both Eric Rhodes (as a preening professional adulterer) and Eric Blore (doing his waiter routine). Edward Everett Horton is Fred's best friend, a dim lawyer who takes on the task of getting Ginger divorced from her elderly, indifferent husband. (Indifferent to Ginger? Of the many implausibilities in this film, that might be the hardest one to swallow.)

There's a good Astaire solo number near the beginning of the film, "A Needle In A Haystack" (music by Con Conrad, lyrics by Herb Magidson). Fred gets dressed in a natty suit while dancing around, over and on the furniture in his sitting room, all the while singing about his quest to find the girl he's suddenly smitten with (who is—who else?).

In the worst idea in the movie Horton, a non-dancer, is partnered with Betty Grable in a novelty number, "Let's K-nock K-neez"—thanks to Horton's inability to dance, Grable is left to carry the very weak comedy of this number on her own.

In fact, it's amazing how much screen time is taken up by characters other than Fred and Ginger; it looks as though the studio still had doubts about their ability to carry a film. They don't even get to dance that much together, just two numbers. The first is Porter's "Night and Day," the model for every falling-in-love ballad that followed. It's taken at a significantly faster tempo than, say, Ella Fitzgerald's later version, but even so it's fluid and beautiful. Ginger finds herself alone with Fred; she tries to leave, he prevents her, and they fall into a swooning dance until her half-hearted resistance is overcome. At the end of the dance Rogers gazes at Astaire in what seems to be unfeigned wonder:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV5e7mWcQJE

One thing to be aware of in this clip and in the others to follow is how beautifully they're shot: the takes are long (sometimes an entire, minutes-long dance is a single take!) and medium shots are used to make sure both that the dancers' bodies are generally visible from head to toe, and that the viewer has a sense of the space that they're moving in. That was due to Astaire, who choreographed and directed his own dances.

The second Fred-Ginger number is "The Continental" (another Conrad/Magidson song), modelled explicitly on "The Carioca," and similarly involving armies of black and white clad dancers executing precision steps in front of a vast white edifice while we wonder what's happened to Fred and Ginger, who disappear five minutes into this 17-minute marathon. Fortunately they return to dance up and down the stairs at the very end.

So, many of the elements of the classic Astaire-Rogers films are present in this one, but the script isn't nearly as clever as it should be, and far too much time is taken up with tired vaudeville routines involving the other characters. Much better things were to follow...

Other posts in this series:

• Fred & Ginger Part 2: Roberta and Top Hat
• Fred & Ginger Part 3: Follow The Fleet and Swing Time
• Fred & Ginger Part 4: Shall We Dance and Carefree

Why Lagaan and Rang de Basanti didn't make my list of favorites

This post is probably going to get me in trouble, but I thought I'd address a couple major absences from my favorite Bollywood films of the 2000s list. Both Lagaan (Land Tax, 2001) and Rang de Basanti (Paint It Saffron, 2006) will make many people's best-of-the-decade lists, both films won a slew of awards and were India's official entries for Best Foreign-Language Film at the US Academy Awards. So why are they missing from my list of favorites?

The first thing to say is that I wasn't trying to make a list of the "best" films of the decade, but of my personal favorites--that is, films I'm drawn to see multiple times. Neither Lagaan nor Rang de Basanti falls into that category. The reasons that particular films speak to us and others of equal quality don't can be mysterious. Still, I'll try to explain why I left each film off my list.

Lagaan is the story of a group of Raj-era villagers who, during a devastating drought, face having to pay a ruinous tribute to the British. Being a sporting type, though, the cartoonishly evil captain of the local British regiment offers to forgive the tax for three years if the villagers can beat his crack cricket team. The villagers have never played the game, don't know the rules and have no equipment, but having no choice they accept the challenge. Led by Bhuvan (Aamir Khan) and aided by the British officer's sympathetic sister Elizabeth (Rachel Shelley), the ragtag villagers must overcome their caste prejudices and romantic rivalries to unite and face the British in the Big Game.

Which takes up the entire second half of the movie. And that's where the problems arise for me, because Big Game movies are suspenseless. We know the underdogs face almost impossible odds, we know the dominant team will build up a near-insurmountable lead, and we know that at the last possible moment--spoiler alert!--the underdogs will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The other suspenseless question at stake in Lagaan is whether the hunky Bhuvan will come to reciprocate Elizabeth's growing love or remain true to his village sweetheart Gauri (Gracy Singh).

--End of spoiler--

Obviously, an uncertainty about the outcome isn't the only reason to watch a narrative. We know, for example, how a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie will turn out even before the opening credits roll, and theater troupes haven't stopped putting on productions of Hamlet just because the audience already knows the ending. But in the case of Lagaan, the rewards of the performances (of its Indian cast, at least) and of Ashutosh Gowariker's direction aren't enough to counterbalance the long, slow unfolding of the inevitable that is its second half. For me.

Rang de Basanti actually has a somewhat similar narrative structure--a disparate group of Indian men comes together and, with the aid of a young British woman, overcomes their differences in the service of a larger goal. In this case the group is made up of pleasure-seeking, apolitical young men who agree take part in the British woman's film about the Indian independence movement. In the process, they learn about the courageous and non-sectarian freedom fighters such as Bhagat Singh and Chandrasekhar Azad. The men's awakening political consciences then inform their plan to expose and avenge the government corruption that has resulted in the death of a friend who was an Indian Air Force pilot.

Like the earlier freedom fighters, the modern-day group turns to violence. Unlike the freedom fighters, though, the modern-day group is not living under the military occupation of a foreign power that has imposed press censorship, arrest without warrant, indefinite detention without trial, secret tribunals, and which has massacred a peaceful and unarmed crowd of men, women and children gathered to celebrate a religious festival. Instead, the modern group lives in a flawed and corrupt but still functioning democracy with a relatively free press.

So when they decide--spoiler alert!--to assassinate the government minister and the industrialist who are responsible for their friend's death, it seems more a failure of imagination than an act of revolutionary justice. And when the minister becomes hailed as a martyr to terrorism, their strategy backfires in a big way. So their next step is an armed takeover of the All-India Radio station, from which they broadcast details of the cozily corrupt relationship between government and business; then they all die in a hail of bullets as the station is stormed by security forces.

--End of spoiler--

But what a waste. Again, their actions seem more motivated by a martyr complex than by a realistic assessment of what would be needed to effect change in their society. Do they consider becoming investigative journalists, exposing misdeeds and directing press campaigns against the incompetent, venal and corrupt? Do they join or create organizations dedicated to bettering the lives of the victimized and powerless? Do they pledge themselves to the Sisyphean task of making a sustained difference? No--working for change in incremental ways is brutally hard and largely unacknowledged work. I felt that Rang de Basanti, in its glamorization of violence, was actually expressing a profound despair about the possibility of real, long-term change in Indian society (and in modern global capitalism in general). That despair may indeed be well-founded, but I felt that the characters--largely children of privilege themselves--hadn't yet earned it.

So that's why neither film is one I'm eager to see again, and why neither made it onto my list of favorites for the past decade. Alternative perspectives are welcome.

Favorite Bollywood films of the 2000s

In response to theBollywoodFan's list of his favorite films of the 2000s, I offer my own selections for the past decade.

Five favorite Bollywood films, plus one ringer (in chronological order, and yes, five out of the six feature Shah Rukh Khan):

Devdas (2002): Sanjay Leela Bhansali's retelling of the tragic loves of Devdas (Shah Rukh Khan), his childhood sweetheart Paro (Aishwarya Rai) and the courtesan Chandramukhi (Madhuri Dixit) is one of the most sumptuous movies ever filmed. Madhuri Dixit's dances are highlights, but all of the songs are integrated into the story with unusual care.

Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003): Three friends (SRK, Saif Ali Khan, and Preity Zinta) learn about laughter, life and love in modern-day New York--but one of them is concealing a tragic secret. Karan Johar's tightly structured script, director Nikhil Advani's razor-sharp direction and the excellent performances of the cast are what made this the film that hooked us on Bollywood.

Veer-Zaara (2004): Veer, an Indian man (SRK) and Zaara, a Pakistani woman (Preity Zinta) meet and fall in love, but are separated for years by the political divisions between their countries. The lush, evocative score by the late Madan Mohan perfectly matches the sweeping emotions of Yash Chopra's love story.

Water (2005): The ringer, since this isn't really a Bollywood (or even Indian) film. But director/writer Deepa Mehta's story of an impossible love between a student (John Abraham) and a young widow (Lisa Ray) in pre-independence India is highly compelling, and both principals offer excellent performances.

Paheli (2005): A feminist retelling of a puppet-theater folk tale in which a neglected wife (Rani Mukherjee) finds emotional and erotic fulfillment with a spirit who takes the form of her absent husband (SRK). So gorgeously shot by director Amol Palekar and cinematographer Ravi Chandran that we forgive them for Shah Rukh's unflattering moustache.

Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006): A brave experiment, in which director/writer Karan Johar tells the story of the disintegration of two mismatched couples (SRK & Preity, Abhishek Bachchan & Rani). No heroes and no villains, just complex, largely believable characters caught up in an emotional maelstrom. Abhishek's best performance to date, I think.

Six films that were worthy contenders for the favorites list, plus one ringer:

Kandukondain Kandukondain (2000): It's a Tamil (Kollywood) rather than Hindi (Bollywood) movie, I know, but I wanted to include this contemporary version of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility because it's so charming. A great story (of course) and wonderful performances by Aishwarya Rai and Tabu as the Marianne and Elinor characters.

Dil Chahta Hai (2001): The story of three young men (Akshaye Khanna, Saif Ali Khan and Aamir Khan) and their romantic involvements with three women (Dimple Kapadia, Sonali Kulkarni and Preity Zinta), this film was a major milestone for its youthful director/writer Farhan Akhtar and for many of its cast members.

Hum Tum (2004): Great chemistry in this romantic comedy between Saif Ali Khan and Rani Mukherjee. Unfortunately, the success of this one gave us the inferior Ta Ra Rum Pum (2007) and Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic (2008) (both on the List of Shame below).

Swades (2004): SRK is a NASA engineer who returns to India to bring his ayah back to the States, only to get caught up in trying to solve the problems besetting her village. Whatever happened to the lovely Gayatri Joshi, SRK's love interest in this one?

Black (2005): Yes, it's a remake of The Miracle Worker (1962), but when Amitabh Bachchan as the teacher and Rani as his reluctant student do such fine work, what does it matter?

Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006): The charming story of a gangster boss (Sanjay Dutt at his most appealing) who holds imaginary conversations with Gandhi, takes a vow of nonviolence and, together with his uncomprehending sidekick Circuit (Arshad Warshi), stands up for the residents of an old-age home. A prime candidate for an introductory film for Bollywood neophytes.

Om Shanti Om (2007): SRK and the appealing Ritesh Deshmukh Shreyas Talpade are especially good in the first half as scrounging "junior artistes" in 1970s Bollywood. The modern-day second half with SRK doing a self-parody as the superstar Om Kapoor doesn't hold up quite as well, but the film is an affectionate, tongue-in-cheek valentine to past and present Bollywood.

Seven films for which I have an inexplicable affection, even though they're all flawed in various ways:

Dil Hai Tumhaara (2002): In many ways this isn't a very good film--but the performances by Preity Zinta as an illegitimate daughter and by Rekha as her embittered stepmother make it compelling anyway. If you can stop watching during the final hour, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.

Munna Bhai MBBS (2003): Sanjay Dutt's second outing as the good-hearted gangster Munna finds the big galoot attending medical school. Some of the humor is predictable or strained, but Sanjay's a delight throughout.

Koi..Mil Gaya (2003): Affecting performances by Hrithik Roshan and the ever-lovely Preity Zinta make this remake of E.T. (1982) surprisingly endearing.

Chori Chori (2003): Add this one to the growing "actors transcending their material" pile. Rani is adorable as Khushi, a woman who is scamming her way through life when she encounters Ranbir (Ajay Devgan), an architect who is stalled both professionally and personally. Of course, we know where this is going long before the characters do, but it's still enjoyable to watch Rani get there.

Vivah (2006): Yes, director Sooraj Barjatya's story of the "journey from engagement to marriage" of the young, beautiful and well-to-do Prem (Shahid Kapoor) and Poonam (Amrita Rao) is lovely, but slow-moving and sentimental. And your point is...?

Aaja Nachle (2007): Madhuri Dixit's return to Bollywood, if not quite to Devdas-level dancing form, transcends its "let's put on a show" formula thanks to her engaging performance.

Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008): OK, the premise stretches credulity past the breaking point. But SRK's performance in a dual role (especially as the introverted Suri) is delightful, and the number "Phir Milenge" brilliantly pays homage to Bollywood's Golden and Silver Ages.

Finally, ten movies that range from disappointing to flat-out awful (you get to decide which movie falls under which category):

Kaho Naa...Pyar Hai (2000)
Yaadein (2001)
Shakti: The Power (2002)
Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon (2003)
Ta Ra Rum Pum (2007)
Jhoom Barabar Jhoom (2007)
Saawariya (2007) (Rani's sequences excepted)
Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic (2008)
U Me aur Hum (2008)
Chandni Chowk to China (2009)

Busby Berkeley

In the early 1930s the director and choreographer* Busby Berkeley created a new form of film musical. Berkeley designed and directed elaborate production numbers featuring armies of chorus girls moving in geometrically precise arrangements. The production numbers in previous musical films had generally been shot from static positions in front of the proscenium—a theater audience's point of view. Berkeley's innovation was to make the camera a part of the choreography by placing it directly overhead, on the chorus line, or even tracking between the dancers' legs onstage.

We've recently been watching several of Berkeley's early musicals for Warner Brothers, and I thought I'd offer a quick survey. I realize that calling these movies "Busby Berkeley musicals" neglects the contributions of directors like Lloyd Bacon and Mervyn LeRoy, who were often in charge of the dialogue scenes. But with all due respect to Bacon and LeRoy, it's the Berkeley-directed dance numbers that make these movies unforgettable. So, in descending order of watchability:

1. Gold Diggers of 1933 is Berkeley's masterpiece, containing some of his most jaw-droppingly enjoyable numbers. Joan Blondell, Ginger Rogers and comedienne Aline MacMahon play wisecracking but good-hearted chorus girls (a setup so successful it was recycled a few years later in the excellent Stage Door (1937), also starring Ginger Rogers). Ruby Keeler is (what else) the ingenue, and her love interest Dick Powell is a rich kid slumming it as a Broadway songwriter. But all you need to know is that the screenplay provides enough snappy dialogue and comic situations to keep you thoroughly entertained between numbers.

And what numbers! From the opening "We're in the Money" (featuring chorus girls clothed in coins and Ginger Rogers singing the lyrics in pig latin) to the "Shadow Waltz" (with dozens of dancers playing neon-lit violins), Berkeley's stagings of the Harry Warren-Al Dubin songs are mind-boggling. My favorite may be the delirious "Pettin' in the Park," which says more about the sexual mores of my grandparents' generation than I really want to know. Here are the last two minutes or so of this sequence (formerly available in its entirety):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQCPDY_ZJpM

The movie closes with "Remember My Forgotten Man," a harrowing song about the mistreatment and neglect of World War I veterans, unforgettably performed by Joan Blondell and Etta Moten. Don't miss this one.

2. 42nd Street (1933) became the template for every backstage musical to follow: when a Broadway show's star (Bebe Daniels) breaks her ankle just before opening night, the ingenue chorus girl Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler) has to go on as her replacement. The movie has Harry Warren and Al Dubin's great title song about that "naughty, gawdy, bawdy, sporty" (or as Ruby Keeler sings, "spawty") thoroughfare, and the classic line delivered to Peggy by the harried director (Warner Baxter) just before she steps onstage: "You're going out a youngster, but you've got to come back a star!"

It also has Ruby Keeler's first and worst film performance. Her line readings are stiff and unconvincing, and worse, her dancing is ungainly and looks like the hard work it must actually be. When she launches into her clomping tap-dance* break during the climactic version of the title song, the tempo of the music audibly slows down instead of speeding up.

Throughout the film Keeler has a stricken, deer-in-the-headlights look. Perhaps she herself realized the ludicrousness of the scene in which another chorus girl gives up her chance to take over the leading role in favor of Keeler. That other chorus girl, who in fact handles the snappy dialogue and the jazzy choreography much more smoothly than Keeler, is played by Fred Astaire's future partner Ginger Rogers. Nah—she could never carry the show...

3. Footlight Parade (1933): Jimmy Cagney burns up the screen in an intense performance as the harried director of spectacular live "prologues" supposedly put on before movie screenings (sure—if the movie theater is the size of an airplane hanger and the exhibitor has an unlimited budget). To win a contract he's got to stage three prologues on one night in three different theaters—and he's only got a single weekend to prepare everything.

But you can forget (or enjoy) the multiple implausibilities when the movie includes Cagney, the great Joan Blondell, and one of the most absurdly spectacular numbers Berkeley ever filmed, the "water ballet" "By A Waterfall."

The inevitable Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are also in the cast, with Keeler giving one of her better performances as a secretary who steps onstage and becomes a star. Just don't think too hard about the racial politics of the final number, "Shanghai Lil" (in which Cagney shows that he can sing and tap-dance a little, too).

4. Gold Diggers of 1935: Lightning does not strike twice; this sequel-in-name-only to Gold Diggers of 1933 testifies to the (temporary) exhaustion of the Berkeley formula—or perhaps, after his grueling work schedule of the previous three years, to Berkeley's own exhaustion. This time, instead of playing a gee-whiz kid, Powell plays a cynical and jaded gold digger himself. The plot centers on the creation of a charity stage show which is so spectacularly lavish that it loses tens of thousands of dollars.

The two main production numbers, to the Warren-Dubin songs "The Words Are In My Heart" and "The Lullaby of Broadway," only partly compensate for the unsatisfying plot. The opening and final images of "Lullaby" are a direct homage to the photographs of Man Ray, suggesting that Berkeley's surrealism was highly self-conscious. And talk about surrealism: the "Lullaby" number is staged as a bizarre morality play which ends with the Broadway Baby (Wini Shaw) falling to her death from a skyscraper—an eerie anticipation of the suicide of Dorothy Hale, immortalized in Frida Kahlo's famous painting. A strange coda to an oddly dark film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx6s-YReOJY

(This is only a fraction of this number, which is nearly 15 minutes long; the full sequence is no longer available.)

* see Jeffrey Spivak's comments below.

Update 6 Feb 2011: Jeffrey Spivak's Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley has been published by the University Press of Kentucky. Thanks again to Jeff for his detailed comments below.

Azhagi

The Tamil-language film Azhagi (2002) was adapted by acclaimed cinematographer Thankar Bachan from his own short story "Kalvettu." Perhaps Bachan was too close to the material, because to me it felt that as a writer and director he sometimes got in the way of his excellent cast. The film is compelling, but some miscalculations and inconsistencies make it less powerful than it might have been. (Image from thankarbachan.com.)

As schoolchildren, Shanmugam and Dhanalakshmi are friends and allies against the cruelties of adults and other children; and as they grow older, they begin to feel the stirrings of an unspoken love. But they are separated when Dhanalakshmi is forced to marry her abusive, alcoholic brother-in-law, while Shanmugam goes off to veterinary college.

Years later Shanmugam (Parthiban) accidentally encounters the widowed Dhanalakshmi (the always superb Nandita Das) and her young son, now impoverished and living on the streets. He decides to bring them home and give Dhanalakshmi a job as a household servant to help his wife Valarmati (Devayani) with their two children.

But no good deed goes unpunished, as they say, and Dhanalakshmi's presence in Shanmugam's household is soon exciting nasty insinuations from the townspeople and inflaming suspicions in his wife. And her suspicions aren't entirely unjustified. It's clear that Shanmugam and Dhanalakshmi's powerful feelings for one another haven't been extinguished, although--with mixed success--they both try to avoid overstepping the bounds of their new relationship. Shanmugam's mother-in-law is outraged by what she sees as Dhanalakshmi's too-familiar manner, while his wife Valarmarti's initial sympathy begins to wear thin as her awareness of her husband's past (and present) emotional connection to the beautiful Dhanalakshmi grows.

The cast is uniformly excellent, including the child actors who play Shanmugam and Dhanalakshmi at various stages of childhood and adolescence (the credits are in Tamil only, so I couldn't identify who they are). Nandita Das' performance as the adult Dhanalakshmi is especially affecting. And the wistful songs by Ilaiyaraaja enhance the melancholy mood. All of these elements come together at the moment that Shanmugam and Dhanalakshmi first encounter one another again in "Un Kuthama" (vocals by Ilaiyaraaja):

But unfortunately Azhagi also includes supposedly comic episodes (featuring the petty corruption of Shanmugam's colleagues) which for me only served to disrupt the delicately established mood. There's also a gratuitous and implausible fight scene where Shanmugam defends Dhanalakshmi's honor (and his own) against a group of insulting men. Bachan may have felt that he had to include these masala elements in order to insure the film's commercial success, but for me they were jarring interruptions that seemed to belong to another film entirely.

At least the comedy and fight scenes can be hastened through using the fast-forward button. More problematic is the character of Valarmati, who swings wildly between the extremes of sympathetic understanding and bitter anger. Bachan needed to add a bit more nuance to her character, although the lovely Devayani does what she can to make Valarmati's reactions seem credible.

I've got a major weakness for stories of impossible loves: characters whose yearning for one another is so held in check by social convention and by their concern for hurting others that they can never bring themselves to act on their feelings. If you share my susceptibility to stories of thwarted passion (or my admiration for Nandita Das) you'll find a good deal to enjoy in Azhagi, despite its flaws.