The miniseries The Tourist starts on the hats of wheels. Literally. Indeed, we immediately meet a man who, like the unlucky driver of the Duel of Spielberg, is chased by a tractor-trailer on a dusty Australian road. Suffering from amnesia when he wakes up in the hospital, he tries to recover his identity one bit of information at a time. This is followed by a game of treasure hunts full of suspense, spurts of hemoglobin and very dark humour. As a man without a past, Jamie Dornan is, yes, memorable.
Known for the erotic titillating nanars of the saga Fifty Shadeswhere he camped a billionaire focused on sadomasochism, but appreciated for the detective series The Fallwhere he played a charismatic serial killer, the Irish actor plunges with ardor into the heart of a winding story at will.
Of course, we think of the film from the start Mementoby Christopher Nolan, with his similarly amnesiac antihero, but The Tourist soon takes other avenues, more openly incredible and sometimes comical, a sign that the whole thing does not take itself – and is therefore not to be taken – too seriously.
Written by Harry and Jack Williams, the creators of the detective series The Missing (Disappearance), The Tourist manages from the first episodes to combine setting up and breathless developments without downtime. Between a stuffed koala and a mysterious handwritten note through a batch of photos taken with a disposable camera, the protagonist who is simply nicknamed “The Man” (The Man) collects the clues without his memory cooperating.
Along the way, he makes a host of encounters, sometimes sinister, like with this killer with the deceptive appearance of a big good-natured bear brilliantly defended by Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, sometimes promising, like with this badly married policewoman played by the formidable Danielle Macdonald.
Nervous achievement
Director of music videos for Mylène Farmer, Lily Allen and Lana Del Rey, but also of the miniseries Back to Life (2019), Chris Sweeney signs a judiciously nervous and dynamic staging, and very pleasing to the eye moreover.
The plot, however, could have been tightened further: four episodes, rather than six, would probably have done the job. In the middle, while one character pursues another, who runs after a third, repeatedly, we flirt with the narrative filling. Without revealing anything, a night trip in the desert where a character digs at gunpoint while a second hallucinates unduly stretches.
Almost every episode has its share of small or big revelations, some joyful, others just preposterous. Of the lot, the last is unfortunately the most uneven, with a succession of sometimes laborious breaks in tone. That said, the final scene brings the adventure to a satisfying close.
In short, failing to cultivate verisimilitude, the whole film turns out to be quite entertaining.