Amnesia Mother: a review of the Australian TV series "The Tourist"
Jamie Dornan loses his memory in a sharp satirical show following in the footsteps of the Coen brothers.
A stranger escapes pursuit in the desert. Some time later, he has an accident, after which he ends up in the hospital with no memory of it. With the help of a local policewoman (Danielle MacDonald), he tries to reconstruct the chain of events and understand who exactly is after him.
In the six-hour "The Tourist," the creators don't even try to reinvent the formula of the usual thriller about retaliation coming on his heels - instead they focus on human factors and ironic storytelling, from which it will be really hard to come away. The series, released earlier this year, was a joint effort between the BBC and the HBO Max streaming service. It may remind viewers of the Coen Brothers' "Fargo" and "Just Blood," the plays of Irish classic Martin McDonagh, and even Nolan's "Mad Max" with "Remember," to which the director managed to send a metallic salute.
The main character's name is revealed about halfway through, when it becomes clear that the man has no commonplace backstory behind him, his baggage, on the contrary, is quite criminal: with blood, extortion, buried alive accomplices and a mentally unstable drug lord as his employer. The Australian black humor here gives battle to the British and even sometimes wins, the roads are dusty and violent, the natural hurricanes in the middle of the desert (a very common phenomenon for that landscape) people and their domestic squabbles are as uninteresting as possible.
The protagonist wakes up with a piece of paper and an address somewhere even more remote. He has to ask Helen, a novice police officer, for help. Behind her simple-hearted smiles and sincere enthusiasm hides an almost tragic fate, which includes intensive preparation for a wedding with a man she does not love, dieting and a sense of her own inadequacy. Helen is burning with a desire to excel in the detective field, so establishing the identity of a mysterious amnesiac patient becomes a matter of the utmost importance to her.
Later on, Helen's scripted status will change from ordinary law enforcement officer to hostage of even greater circumstances and even acquire romantic tones, but getting ahead of ourselves would be disrespectful to the audience, since The Tourist is best savored in a few receptions (a long forgotten sense of suspense in film and television).
Dornan and McDonald give off some of their best work so far. The former jumped over himself in last year's "Barb and Star" is unlikely to succeed, but the comparison with the same series "The Downfall" it can still hold: the image of a lost nomad to himself and others with a criminal background is convincing and, importantly, humorous. McDonald, an Australian, is incredibly moving, her sense of isolation in her upcoming marriage and her desire to emancipate herself brilliantly. The supporting cast includes one of Australia's top current actors, Damon Harriman (Tarantino's Charles Manson in Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood), whose detective inspector has his own plans for the lost character.
A separate stratum of "The Tourist" is devoted to family: it turns out that not only do people lose their memories here, but also their relatives and their support in a variety of situations. The central character seems to see his mother in his dreams (the reality turns out to be a shocking nightmare, brutal and qualitatively recreated), threats to wives force some participants to go for treachery, husbands are blackmailed and lose their hearing, brothers die and appear as ghosts. There is no one to trust in this post-apocalyptic oasis, and it is all the more risky to trust oneself - you never know who you killed in a past life and what you have done wrong to the sarcastic Creator.
The second half of the series is less convincing than the first half (lots of scattered endings and sudden esotericism seasoned with psychotropics), but screenwriters Harry and Jack Williams, who worked on "Missing Persons" and "Crappy," manage to bring things to a logical conclusion and offer a workable alternative for an evening of binge-watching. "The Tourist" has already been renewed for a second season, so we'll see more of this disease story if we wish (if we remember it, of course).
This article was sponsored by Alex Tikhomirov
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