Tourist Family, the new Tamil film written and directed by debutant Abishan Jeevinth, is not a film that breaks any conventions to create a feel-good movie. Abishan follows a very familiar style of building various subplots that will have a payoff at a later stage. But he is very aware of the kind of cliched and cheesy style he is following, and he consistently tweaks each of those predictable events. The movie’s intention is very clear, and without really going into too many of the convolutions possible in a migration story, Tourist Family ultimately manages to be that self-aware, fun-filled story about being good and spreading goodness.
Dharmadas and his family are from Sri Lanka, and due to the post-Covid financial crunch that happened in Sri Lanka, they decided to migrate illegally to Tamil Nadu. After many hardships, the family reached Chennai where Das’s brother-in-law had arranged a rental house for them. The family was given strict advice to not reveal their identity to any of the neighbors. What we see in the film is the risky life of this family in their new neighborhood.
There is one scene in the movie where the residents are attending the immemorial of someone, and the focus of the event eventually goes to Das for some kind gesture he did to someone in the neighborhood. It is that typical cheesy hero-worshiping kind of scene. Like I said in the beginning, the director is very aware when such a scene happens, and in the case of this particular scene, he uses the younger son of Das to acknowledge the cheesiness of the sequence, and the young boy says, looking at the way everyone is talking about you, I think I must place your photo here rather than the dead person. There are more instances in the film where we see the director tweaking the scenes to break our predictions. This pattern is applied to many types of scenes, ranging from tragic ones to humourous ones.
The movie is ultimately built around the idea of “do good and good will come to you.” And Abishan is using every subplot here to set up a list of good things done by the family. The final act of the movie is this melodramatic episode where a group of people are doing something collectively and the success of Tourist Family actually lies in the fact that Abishan was able to make that part look very real. The movie is like a collection of familiar scenes we see in mainstream family drama movies, but with a practical tweak to the tale. When the elder son says he will always have the image of his girlfriend when he hears a particular song, the younger one fixes that problem by delivering a dance performance that can replace the ex from his brother’s head. The antagonist track in this story is not really a strong one. But when you look at the finale of the film, you would realize that there was no need for it to be really heavy.
M Sasikumar is totally believable as this family man Dharmadas. I generally find his acting in dramatic patches a bit restrained and self-cautious, and that problem was there in this movie as well. Simran was pretty good as the wife, Vasanthi, and the groundedness of that character looked believable on screen. Aavesham fame Mithun Jai Shankar has done the role of the elder son in the family, and there was enough space for him to perform in the film. Elango Kumaravel, MS Bhaskar, Ramesh Thilak, Sreeja Ravi, Bhagavathi Perumal, Yogi Babu, Yoga Lakshmi, and several others are in the star cast of this film. The most memorable performance, by the way, came from young Kamalesh Jagan. The kid is mostly handling humor in this movie, and Abishan was able to pull off a lot of scenes mostly because of the convincing performance of this boy.
Somewhere, some of the emotional beats of this story reminded me of Sudani from Nigeria. While that movie was a very rooted, realistic film about finding parallels between people from different parts of the world, this one is slightly on the filmier side. With the language eventually becoming a sign of acceptance, this tale of inclusivity does manage to put a smile on our faces.
