The story is about a Sri Lankan family that seeks refuge in India, and the film is the very definition of a family entertainer. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
The opening scene of Tourist Family shows us the latter part of the title: namely, the family. There’s Dharmadas and Vasanthi, played by Sasikumar and Simran, and their two sons, played by Mithun Jai Shankar and Kamalesh Jegan. They are at a beach in Sri Lanka, staring at the ocean that they are going to cross to get to India, in order to escape the economic crisis in their homeland. The situation is pure tragedy. These four people are not just staring at the ocean, they are also staring at an uncertain future. The song over the opening credits contains these tragic words: “kadal thaandi vandhaalum kannula kadal-ah sumandhu vandhom”. BUT… the song isn’t tragic. The tune and the arrangements by Sean Roldan are utterly celebratory. It’s something you can dance to at a party. And this brilliant mix of tonalities is the film’s USP, its magic ingredient.
Drama that unexpectedly turns to laugh-out-loud comedy, comedy that unexpectedly becomes moving drama – this tone is set as soon as this family lands in Rameswaram, and are caught by the cops. Ramesh Thilak and Yogi Babu join in, and there’s also a dog. You sense the older son’s internalised anger and also how much he respects his father, when he asks Dharmadas not to beg for something. (The payoff for this character trait occurs in a brilliant scene that occurs after the interval.) You sense a cop’s sadness when he talks about his young son. But two seconds later, the younger son makes us burst out with laughter. At the end of this stretch, I was sold. This is Abishan Jeevinth’s first film, and he is all of 25. His writing is far better than his filmmaking: the staging is ultra-basic. But I really didn’t mind because, by the end, the wholesome humanity in this story left me with tears.
For the second time this year, after Ashwath Marimuthu’s Dragon, the spirit of Frank Capra is up there on Tamil screens. This film, too, borders on fantasy. For instance: A man may not pay his employees, but he still treats them with respect: he will not serve them coffee in paper cups just because they are lower in class. Almost everyone is a good person, and if they do not immediately display the goodness inside them, it’s due to circumstances. And when the Sri Lankan family settles in Chennai, Dharmadas becomes the angel who awakens this goodness inside each and every one in his new community. One of the most beautiful points of Tourist Family is that no one is really a “refugee”. Goodness and kindness and humanity have no borders. Despite the tiger statuette in his bag, a man like Dharmadas belongs as much in this land of Tamilian Tamils as he does in his land of Sri Lankan Tamils.
MS Bhaskar, Bagavathi Perumal, Yogi Babu, Ramesh Thilak, Simran – all of them contribute solidly in supporting parts. But the film belongs to Sasikumar, who gets one of the best roles of his acting career. As his sons, Mithun Jai Shankar and Kamalesh Jegan are excellent, and there is a stunner of a sequence post-interval where the father and his sons burst out with their emotions about the past and present. The way this big scene keeps flipping between comedy and drama and drama and comedy, the way the older son’s love angle (with a terrific Yogalakshmi) is introduced through an apparently random scene involving a thief, the casual way in which we are shown the thin red scars on Vasanthi’s wrist, the way the story of a drunk man by the roadside is revealed at a most unexpected point, the way a man who hates hugging people finds himself embracing someone – the scenes that work are like magic.
And that’s why the scenes that push too hard on sentimentality (with a spoon-feeding background score) stick out oddly – like the stretch involving an alcoholic, or the one where we see older memories of a couple. And a subplot involving a bomb blast does not sit as cleanly in the film as the rest of the writing. Intentionally or not, the “villain” in these portions is a Hindi-speaker, and this Hindi-versus-Tamil angle ends up mirroring the language issue in Tamil Nadu. But if bits of overt melodrama are the only sin, a film has done most things right. Tourist Family is knitted together so well that a line about crossing the seas (which is used twice) becomes both romantic and political. Every plot point is foreshadowed, every payoff has had a setup. This is very solid writing, and it shows a strong new voice. Tourist Family is an example that even the worst tragedies can be treated as entertainment, and that messaging can be done without preaching. For a debut feature, that’s an impressive achievement.
