'Tourist Family' Movie Review: Sasikumar, Simran Carry This Naive But Charming Refugee Drama

Director: Abishan Jeevinth
Writer: Abishan Jeevinth
Cast: Sasikumar, Simran, Yogi Babu, Mithun Jai Sankar, Kamalesh
Language: Tamil

Written and directed by debutante Abhishan Jeevinth, Tourist Family confidently wears its sweetness on its sleeve. Following a family of four that depart Sri Lanka on a boat due to the precipitating economic crisis in the teardrop island, finding and making a home in a suspicious but welcoming Tamil Nadu, the film is so committed to sweetness it hammers every possible issue, every social itch — displacement, xenophobic anxiety, romantic longing, and the repressive police — into a montage of kindness. 

But can kindness be a political solution? There is something bold, naive, hopeful, and tiresome about Tourist Family. You can never win against the worn out state, but you can always charm it. 

The film begins on the Valvettithurai beach of Sri Lanka, where Dharmadas (M. Sasikumar), his wife Vasanthi (Simran) and two kids (Mithun Jai Sankar as Nithushan and Kamalesh as Mulli) are looking sea-wards, waiting to hitch a boat to Rameshwaram in Tamil Nadu. 

When Dharmadas asks, “Kalambalaama?”, (Shall we leave?) Mulli beams “Yes daddy!” as though packed and strapped for a noontime picnic. The framing is neat, static, the tone is light. Their screams on the boat — unlike, say, the screams on the refugee boat in Kannathil Muthamittal fleeing a different Sri Lankan crisis, making a similar journey — are girded by joy. Mulli cannot swim. His father promises to protect him. Mulli retorts — but you also cannot swim!

This isn’t slapstick, but a lightness of spirit in the darkest of times — a family being forced to flee home, and then find home. It takes a while to sink into this rhythm because it can feel a bit careless and constructed. So insistent on defanging any sense of threat, even the police that catches the family on the Rameshwaram shore is charmed into letting them go. It is like watching a tragedy that has decided to come dressed in a clown’s costume. Do you laugh when he makes you laugh, or see the costume for what it is? 

With the help of Vasanthi’s brother (Yogi Babu), the family finds a home in a predominantly Christian neighbourhood of upper middle-class homes in Chennai. The family is strictly told to not fraternise with the neighbours, and keep their Sri Lankan identity to themselves. When has charm ever known its bounds?

By and large, the neighbours are solitary creatures — a grumpy but principled old man, a couple with a gregarious wife and antisocial husband who are deeply in love, an alcoholic youth, among others. Initial gags where they try to camouflage as a family from Kerala — “Tamizh konjam Kathakali aadudhu” (their Tamil is doing Kathakali) — eventually iron out into moving expositions of each other’s lives, truth hurled as community-building exercise. As the first hour bleeds into the second, everyone seems to be in love with them, and everyone finds a way to love themselves.

Most of the latter half of the film is set in the confines of this neighbourhood. This is convenient, because Dharmadas always has one eye out for the crimes of the world. The kind of man who will feed everyone biscuits and chips, and collect the plastic into a bag to throw it diligently into the dustbin; when he sees a man drunk by the wayside, he will stop the car to help him out. Imagine letting him loose into the world? Soon, the neighbourhood feels not a part of the world, but suspended in it — a snowglobe of spirits, each warmer than the last.  

M. Sasikumar’s performance, like that of Simran’s, tries to balance the light-touch to the heavy subject, their faces unable to contain both the small joys of being present in one place and the large tragedies of being absent from another. There is something airdropped about the ease with which they slither into whatever situation they are flung into. The kindness of their spirit is like the kindness the film affords them, never labouring them beyond what they can handle, never pushing their backs against the wall. 

Given those guardrails of the story, both actors bloom into their characters. If anyone is homesick it is Nithushan. He, too, will find a way to reorient his homeward gaze to the immediate walls around him. These scenes — of him with the landlord’s daughter — keep scratching at romance, never striking it, until a line on crossing seas is dropped and left like a hot vessel, we are left staring at our scalded hands. The craft of this is stunning and precise, as is the humour given to and inhabited by Kamalesh, a toothy oversmartness that never screeches in the ears or bleeds in the eyes. These are such perfectly proportionate performances, finding the tone of the scene and flitting with it as it swerves from grumpy rants to a gangly dance. A good actor inhabits an emotion fully, but an effortless actor finds pathways into and out of that emotion, too.

Despite the forceful sweetness in tone, the film’s visual language is cool, clean, and distant. It frames patiently, all the joys and anxieties. There is not much movement of the camera. You do not get close-ups when you predict them — as punchlines to jokes, for example. It is the score that clues us in everytime we think the film is slipping into the tragic, the tense. There is a blast in Rameshwaram, the bomb in the very bin Dharmadas flung his trash into. The CCTV caught him in the act, and the police are now on his tail thinking him suspicious. Serves him right for not clogging a drain. 

It is this part of the film, with a forcefully brutal investigation by a North Indian officer, that feels like it could have benefited from the same kindness it dispenses elsewhere. After all, isn’t he too an outsider in this state? He beats up an accused, and his desperation to crack the case turns him into a villain. But the film keeps patting us on the back — this is not that kind of film. 

What kind of film is it, then? Dharmadas, drunk, is accused by Nithusan that he makes decisions without consulting them, and that this displacement from home has hurt them all. The scene could sour into resentment. But Nithusan immediately reframes his anger towards his father as disappointment towards himself — he hoped to have landed a job in Sri Lanka so his father could retire in peace, and now he is not even given the possibility of that dream, to see his father in comfort? The father apologises — for being an inconvenience, for being a father. The family is sewn back before it even has the chance to rip apart. Such is this family. Such is this world. Such is this film.