Thuramukham

I was super excited for this one just like any other film enthusiast in Kerala cause of the casting and the continuous delay for the release. All this excitement and delay definitely build up a huge hype around this movie from the day it was announced. However to my surprise the film ain't living up to the hype, i would say the script itself killed this film. The script seems to be one of the most laggy and boring ones i have seen this year or the past. The cast seems to be the only good thing about this film. Joju George, Arjun Ashokan and Poornima Indrajith have all performed pretty well comparing others on this slow pace script. Nivin Pauly seems to be a pretty bad choice for the cast here, feels like he is undermining his former performances. The background scores are dull and depressing to every single scene on this film. The director might have wanted to pay respect to the original story behind the script but the film just doesn't make it work for me. The movie starts off with a little energy and it slowly digs its own grave as the story progresses. By halftime all most everyone in the theatre was like where the hell is this movie going!!! The supposingly second half is way more dull and dead, characters end up here n there with the story going somewhere else. I would only recommend this film to those who are really spiked about the true story behind the script and has got 3 hours to kill. Definitely didn't expect this level of dullness from the director and crew, could've done a lot better!!!

After watching Rajeev Ravi's long-delayed Thuramukham, I begin to wonder whether Gopan Chidambaran's script was intentionally stripped off its commercial elements and high moments, or if it was entirely the director's vision (or choice) to deliver a straightforward, realistic account of the harbor workers protest in the '50s. Whatever the case may be, Thuramukham ends up feeling half-baked. By placing its focus on Nivin Pauly's anti-hero Moidu, the screenplay dangles on slippery ground. The protagonist here is clearly Moidu's brother Hamza (Arjun Ashokan, who puts up a good show) but the writing lends him the short end of the stick. As for the unhinged, two-minded Moidu, the arc is all over the place. The cold sibling rivalry in the film is thematically similar to Chidambaran's earlier screenplay for Amal Neerad's Iyobinte Pusthakam, but that film had greater commercial inclinations, which also made it supremely enjoyable.

Thuramukham's best stretch is indeed the black & white opening act featuring Joju George, Sudev Nair, and Poornima Indrajith. When the story fast-forwards to the adulthood of Moidu and Hamza, in addition to building tedious reasons for the workers protest to gain steam, the film restrains from offering anything exciting. The performances from the ensemble remain solid throughout, but the flaccid plot developments and the lack of coherence in the treatment of Pauly's character bring the film down several notches. Additionally, the songs and the score felt so one-note (this is coming from someone who relished K's work in Kammatipaadam) and the random fade-outs in several important scenes almost took me out of the story.

I felt bored at many points but it got interesting towards the end. A well directed tale of the struggles of our ancestors for their rights and the price they paid for true freedom and equality. Screenplay was a bit lazy. Unorganized maybe. There were pointless repetitiveness of things and many unwanted scenes that could be avoided to keep the film intact and interesting... Casting was brilliant. Most of the actors have done great job and justified the characters they played... Indrajit didn't fit in that role in my opinion... Great set and edits made it look like actually in the 50s.... BGM was bad... Super bad.

I really wanted to love Thuramukham (The Harbor) for it has a lot of things I generally love in cinema. A hard-hitting intro set in period and monochrome, the old ways of doing things (pre-Independence and immediate post-independence India), poverty, slow-burning plot, and lifelike performances. Yet with all that heavy load, it falters somewhere around the midway as if the makers had lost strength after all that heavylifting. Thuramukham is a film in the "what could have been" category had it evolved out of its documentary-like filmmaking and given a redeeming factor to its characters. As it stands now, the climax makes it feel like all that heavy load was for nothing. I still feel there's a good film hidden inside Thuramukham, and hence is a required viewing.

Malayalam cinema from the 80s has seen a number of iterations of this same story in a more commercialized package of that time. Even though there are certain nuances and clever subversions here, giving a bit more identity than those films, those never really rise in a cinematic way to reach out to the audience effectively as it could have.

The opening black and white scenes with Joju remain the peak cinematic moments in the film. Almost every cinematic aspect was top-notch for those 10-15 minutes and everything that followed was a bit underwhelming.

Nivin's character arc is laid out in a certain way that reminds you of early iterations of such characters only to show those were films and this is something that wants to show the reality. But the problem is that after around the first hour of the film, it kind of felt a bit disjointed and all over the place.

Despite all these issues, Thuramukham is a solid film documenting the political landscape and the lives of labourers and their families in Mattanchery. There's a lot in the film that I enjoyed and a lot that I thought could have been better which could have made this film really great. I can see why someone would like it a bit more than me or doesn't like it at all.

Even at three hours, it felt evident that there's a lot more that is edited out of this movie. There were a lot of scenes and actors that felt like haven't finished their purpose. I do believe this would have been a really great miniseries with enough time to explore every aspect of it, instead of trying to cram this into three hours.

This is the best performance by Arjun Ashokan I've seen despite him being in every other Malayalam movie last year and Poornima's performance shows we're wasting a great talent by not casting her in a lot more movies. Sudev Nair was also really impressive in showing the difference between the two time periods and still being formidable throughout it.

Overall, I really enjoyed the movie but it could have been something really greater.