What struck me first watching Thuramukham, a large-scale period picture about docker struggle in coastal Kerala, is how abstract and timeless it feels. Rajeev Ravi’s fourth feature is certainly set in a specific location and era—the area of Mattanchery in Cochin during the forties and the fifties—but it isn’t until a good while that these particulars come to the fore. Where Rajeev’s previous films establish time and place in their opening minutes, Thuramukham immerses us into a fable-like world that feels untouched by history. When the camera descends into an anonymous settlement of huts in the first shot — one of the film’s many convergences with Bala’s Paradesi (2013) — it’s not even clear if it’s a real space.

Living in this netherworld—a cinematographer’s paradise, with its candlelit rooms and nocturnal action—are dockhands who fight every day for chapas, work permits tossed at them by exploiting contractors, and spend what remains of their wages on alcohol and gambling. Part of Thuramukham traces the evolution of this lumpen mass into a proletariat fighting for its rights, developed through the characters of brothers Moidu (Nivin Pauly) and Hamza (Arjun Ashokan). This vast, generation-spanning narrative arc gives the film an epic sweep comparable to that of Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), on which Rajeev was cinematographer.

The sprawl of the film has another possible source. Rajeev Ravi is a filmmaker with a weakness for classic literature. He gravitates towards stories of individuals swept along by the forces of time. His characters are often passive witnesses of history who, by choice or circumstance, become its protagonists. Thuramukham, written by Gopan Chithambaran and dipping in and out of Russian literature, fissures the leading character of Kammattipaadam (2016) into the figures of Moidu and Hamza, men whose nihilism or passivity renders them victims of history, only to fuse them again in their choice to act.

The monumentality of Thuramukham is only part of the story. What really nuances this testosterone-driven saga, and why I find the film to be a significant departure from Rajeev’s earlier work, is the way it relentlessly balances the epic with the intimate. The world of Thuramukham is very distinctly divided into domestic and public spheres, which respectively translate to feminine and masculine domains of action. Politics is the means by which men look out for one another, while women find solace in each other through shared suffering and mutual care.

The lack of feminine agency in Rajeev’s films has been noted, and I can’t help but feel that Thuramukham is working out an answer to that reproach. At first glance, the film only adds fuel to the fire. Confined to their homes, the women nurture, love and suffer in silence as men get out there to take control of their fates. But, for once, we also see the havoc the men wreak by their actions or inaction. The film reserves its most evocative closeups for its leading women, the terrific Poornima Indrajith and Nimisha Sajayan, whose faces bear the brunt of men’s follies.

So the film responds to the exclusion of women from public sphere by revalorizing the domestic sphere. For one, its political story is couched within an intricate filial narrative in which the class consciousness of the prodigal son coincides with his coming home while that of his brother coincides with his leaving home for the streets. It is also substantial that, unlike its predecessors, Thuramukham ends on the closeup of a woman, one who has been forced to leave her household and mourn in public.

[Originally written for IFFR 2021]