Tourist Family: A Wonderful Balancing Act of Humour & Melodrama

IN ABISHAN JEEVINTH'S debut feature, a Tamil-speaking family from Sri Lanka lands on the shores of Rameshwaram. We don’t see it, but we get the sounds of their torrential journey through opening credits and even later in the film—a rocking boat, tense waters and the fear of losing oneself to the mighty ocean. But we also get the funny side of it. The youngest kid says he doesn’t know how to swim, and the father reassures him. He is quick to retort, “But you don’t know how to swim either!” The aptly titled Tourist Family is not satire but a light take on heavy problems like geopolitics, economic and migrant crisis. Abishan’s film balances the weight of the emotion of shared camaraderie with a feathery slice of life humour.

With the screenplay by Abishan, Tourist Family plays the long game of creating jokes within jokes and plots within plots. The film begins with a long joke that plays out from a stray dog con to an emotional appeal for brotherhood in the time of distress. Dharmadas (M Sasikumar) and Vasanthy (Simran) come to Chennai along with their two sons, Nithushan (Mithun Jai Sankar) and Mulli (Kamalesh). Vasanthy’s brother, played by Yogi Babu, gives them the jumpstart with a house and other immediate utilities, and Das begins hunting for a job. We get the parallel story of the family assimilating into a modern, aloof neighbourhood in Chennai along with a police investigation into a bomb in a dustbin in Rameshwaram. These two tracks play out in interesting ways and always do the unexpected, even if the sentimental beats of the story are similar. A police constable asks his colleague to be more cynical, and we get a development where we think that turn is imminent. But Abishan surprises us by making it about something else that still forwards the plot and the investigation.

Tourist Family takes care of the little things and drops crumbs throughout its run. Das, during his road journey from Rameshwaram to Chennai, never litters and always steps out of the car to throw away the refuse in the trash. He offers food to his family as well as to the driver. He even helps an unconscious man by calling an ambulance. This is not so much about “migrants are nice people”; this is just a delineation of Das and the values he believes in and those he wants his family to imbibe as well. These are also related to the plot! In another offhand moment, we see a scar on Vasanthy’s wrist, suggesting the dark days that this family has seen. It is not extracted for emotions; it is just there as the bare truth that colours the lives of these people, giving the film itself multiple layers and shades.

This slots Tourist Family as something like a Rajkumar Hirani film, and it is a genre that is sorely missing in Tamil cinema, an industry that’s simply forgotten the genre of comedy. Good Night last year, Kudumbasthan this year, and Tourist Family now are welcome attempts to broaden the slate. Like any Hirani film, the film busies itself with the family’s effortless forging of companionship among the neighbours, with little moments for each of them. We meet Richard (MS Bhaskar), his conduct and conversations mark him as both a stern and just man. There is also the elderly married couple of Gunasekhar (Elango Kumaravel) and Mangayakarasi (Sreeja Ravi). Abishan likes to surprise us here as well. In the initial moments, he paints Gunasekhar as a rather different kind of man, only to gradually reveal the details and circumstances. There are more, even nameless ones, and all of them make an impact.

Abishan is clever with the nuances of the family’s predicament. He relates the larger dialogue the film is having with a country’s crisis to a simple argument in the family. Nithushan insists that if somebody is silent, that doesn’t mean they have no problems. Tourist Family stays in the passing lane and deftly navigates around these tricky political angles; the film is about them, but it also puts storytelling above everything, which makes its points more effective. And above all, the film respects humour and the lighter side of everything. Every scene that is played in a high register, making this a melodrama at times, is broken by an inspired gag or playful banter. Almost all of them are great. While Sasikumar takes care of the dramatic bits, Kamalesh is a star. MS Bhaskar and Elango Kumaravel bring the required gravitas for their roles, while Yogi Babu and Bhagavathi Perumal play the fools with appropriate regulation. As star references in films go, Tourist Family comes up with the very best for Simran.

In many films that deal with this subject, a migrant’s experience is built around the fraught relationship with the people as well as the state. The conflict here is always with the state, not with the common people. The individual troubles and heartbreaks are centred around the family’s psychological situation rather than any friction with the larger society. The lies and fabrication last hardly a couple of days, and yet the family persists because of its goodness and that of the people around. What brings a real crisis to their doorstep is the police. Though making the comically aggressive police officer a Hindi-speaking person is a choice! We know from the news that the local police are no less brutal. But that minor quibble aside, the admirable “all people are good people” philosophy guides the film towards interesting directions. Displacement might create fissures that need deft steering, but Tourist Family wants us to jettison the idea of second-guessing people or meddling with their very real lives.