Spoilers ahead…
In ‘Kammatipaadam’, Rajeev Ravi took an issue and wove a “story” around it. Now, in ‘Kuttavum Shikshayum’ and ‘Thuramukham’, the issues *are* the story. He’s weaving tapestries of a particular place, a particular time.
Stylistically speaking, Rajeev Ravi’s Thuramukham can be seen as a companion piece to his earlier film, Kuttavum Shikshayum. The latter was a police drama – an interstate cops-and-robbers story – that ditched easy thrills for rock-solid procedural detail. It was not a glamorous script about supercops. We got to see, step by incremental step, what an investigation is really like. In Thuramukham, we get to see what the building of a workers’ movement is really like. Again, Rajeev (with his writer, Gopan Chidambaran) resists simple glamorisation. This is not about the making of a hero who single-handedly made the movement. The film is about solidarity (“all of us will be equal”) and thus, everyone is a hero. You don’t get the full grasp of this incremental design until you see that the rousing speech at the end is given not by the characters played by Nivin Pauly or Arjun Ashokan or Indrajith Sukumaran, but by someone else, someone who registered, earlier, as a minor player. It’s like how a tail-ender might end up saving a match after the star batsmen have fallen.
You can read the rest of the review here:
https://www.galatta.com/malayalam/movie/review/thuramukham/
And you can watch the video review here:
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Baradwaj Rangan 
Rohit Sathish Nair
March 11, 2023
I particularly liked the score, which is both very Arabic and Islamic, and very blues-y. Not sure how much of it they derived from the original play, but the score even organically seems to link the blues-y elements of the score, to those chants and cheers by the port workers during duty, and even the inanimate sounds that fill the atmosphere of the port. Sure we don’t know if it fares enough memorability, but then we can’t say for sure if that is the yardstick to go by, particularly given the genre of music at hand.
Speaking of memorability, it’s interesting to compare the film’s music to that of another film termed an ‘epic’, which is also about an incident of police firing. Malik’s score comes from quite a few places too: Arabic, Sicilian, Latin American, you mean it, and as rousing as it genuinely is at times, you can also see how derivative it is, and read its inspirations rightaway. That said, how we recall this kind of a score better, as well as how we instantly see where the score derives, may both have their sources in it being more based on fixed compositions and closer to the conventions of popular film music.
‘Thuramukham’-‘s music is also interesting to think of when you consider Rajeev Ravi’s directorial oeuvre as a whole. K has worked with him in ‘Annayum Rasoolum’ and ‘Kammatipaadam’ too and his work here is closer to the former, but it’s interesting how the other two Rajeev Ravi films, with other composers, have their music sound like it’s one of a piece with these works too
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brangan
March 11, 2023
The video review is up.
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Rohit Sathish Nair
March 22, 2023
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