Tourist Family Film Review: Sometimes it feels that a film is really working hard to make you feel something, fulfilling all emotional signs, but you are just not buying it? This is an experience of experience with a tourist family. The setup is powerful: Das (Sasikumar), Vasanthi (Simran), and his two sons fled from Sri Lanka for Tamil Nadu, becoming a immigrant trying to make a life. Initially helped by Prakash (Yogi Babu), he inadvertently rented an apartment owned by local police inspector (box) in Chennai. Das wants to work as a driver, they try to mix – this is a reliable conflict, when a bomb blast changed the suspicion of the police towards the Sri Lankan people, the victim was eventually taken to their door. The director of the debut wants to tell a story about flexibility, community and the underlying goodness, which is clearly shining through adversity.
Where the film sometimes loses its position, how does it display this goodness. Instead of allowing circumstances to breathe, it sometimes depends on the plot points that feel less like lowering life and more like the more predetermined story beats are designed for sympathy. Need to show family relations with neighbors? An elderly woman passes easily for a common moment of sorrow. Need to expose the saint of the slave? Introduce a deeply disturbed neighbor (the mother backstory completed with a tragic Alzheimer’s) who only shows anxiety for the slave, concludes in a speech about his greatness. Even the Inspector’s daughter of her adolescence is negligent in the family unit (the parents are left in their care while staying away), become another convenient witness to their properties. It all sounds a little easier, very manufactured.
Amidst these emotional events, work by comedy and very well. The film finds its anchor in central demonstrations. Sasikumar and Simran, for the first time sharing the important screen space, create a reliable and grounded couple with immense pressure. Sasikumar portrayed slave’s determination and underlying heat, while Simran brings a mixture of vulnerability and strength as a mother holding the family together. Their natural chemistry is a certain plus. The younger son played by Kamlesh also provides moments of real levity (although sometimes his nonsense Greats), and the film’s authentic Sri Lankan Tamil dialect uses a valuable layer of realism in his conversation.
There is a gentle eye on the challenges of tourist families start, even if the story is somewhat formula.
Written by: Abhinav Subramanian
