Intro
’Azhagi’ means ’the beautiful one’ and is used in the feminine gender in Thamizh and Malayalam. This movie is the debut directorial venture of ace cinematographer Thangar Bachchan. In the process he has weaved a sentimental, romantic and decent movie trying to avoid masala as much as possible.
The story
Shanmugham played by Parthiban and Thanalakshmi essayed by Nandhita Das are youngsters in a small village in Tamilnadu. They attend a local school and are attracted to each other. Thanalakshmi belongs to a well to do family and is also of a superior caste. Shanmugham belongs to a caste that is considered low in the village. The village school has teachers who don’t care about serious education and go around rambling on and off about one thing or another. In a fit of a moment Thanalakshmi is married off to a drunkard and moves to another place while heart broken Shanmugham takes life seriously and pursues education with vengeance.
Years later, Shanmugham manages to becomes a vet a is married to Valarmathi played by Devayani. He’s making good money and the days of starving with an empty stomach are over. Shanmugham is shown leading a happy life with his family but his eyes betray his thoughts and in them you can see a longing, a sense of loss from the past. One rainy day Shanmughan’s life crosses with Dhanalakshmi’s and meets her at a road construction site to find out that she’s alone with a child works as a labourer to make ends meet. Shanmughan, visibily devastated by this incident takes Dhanalaksmi to his house as a maid-servant and the movie progresses into it’s end which is quite predictable.
Inferences
Overall the story is quite simple and is beautiful in the way it has been essayed. The childhood scenes are a treat to watch with the kids acting their roles to perfection and also looking and behaving as if it was the real Parthiban and Nandita in their younger days. The teenagers playing the roles of the two lead characters also do their job well. It’s Parthiban and Nandita who steal the show. Frankly I was disappointed to hear that Pathiban was the protagonist, but all my concerns were washed away when I watched this move. Here was a normally over the top, typical masala Parthiban essaying a role with a lot of conviction and courage and remaining subtle in his portrayal. There was incredible pathos in all that he was not saying or doing on screen.
Nandita Das’ debut movie in Thamizh is a sterling testimony to her acting skills. Not once does her body language or style deflect out attention from the villager she was portraying. Imagine Trisha or Jyothika doing a similar role and you’ll get to the intensity of what I am trying to convey here. Devayani does her part neatly. Venniradai Moorthy and Vivek who come in the respective periods to provide comic succor to the otherwise melancholic and tear-jerking movie only make us squirm in our seats. Especially Viveks comedy which appears to have been written like a railway track, parallel to the main screenplay.
Music by Ilaiyaraja is the best and I am sure ’Thuliyilay’, ’Pattu Solli ..’, ’En Kuththama’, ’Oru Sundari Vandhalam, ’Damakku’ would linger in audience minds for years from now. That’s what the maestro is all about, give him a script with a folksy background and he’ll prove how the heck he did 1000 movies in the same genre and yet is able to come up with a new and melodic track. Thankar Bachan does a superb job in his first attempt at wielding the megaphone. It is evident that he was forced to include the comedy and one suspiciously written song ’Kuruvi Kodanja’ for the front benchers.
Overall
There are very few people in this world who don’t nurse bruises to their heart in the teen years. This is a film which takes this pain as it’s medicine and tries to paint/draw colors on paper with a pencil. The beauty of using a pencil when drawing is that you can only draw one color - black. But the various hues you can create by the amount of gentle force your hand can put on the pencil can bring out the most subtlest of vibrations in the viewers mind and at times one feels that colors wouldn’t be able to do justice to what this can. This movie is the closest once can relate to this concept, drawing with a pencil on plain paper - rustic, unpolished, unsophisticated, sentimental and very powerful in moving the viewer.
This reviews is dedicated to a friend who saw this on TV yesterday and instilled in me the urge to spread the message of getting as much people as possible to rent a DVD/VCD and enjoy this piece of sheer brilliance in story telling. At the end of the day, that’s what cinema is all about.