Grand Tour poetically travels across space, time, and form to create a comedic melodrama of ethnographically sweeping proportions. Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes mixes the aesthetics of the early 20th century and the present day to remind his audience of artifice, orientalism, and the fabrications of the Western eye. While manipulating the very form of problematic lensing the film is building off: Grand Tour is an interesting study of a man who constantly runs from facing his future wife - travelling across a changing Asia with an interstitial essay-like narration that Chris Marker (director of Sans Soleil) would admire.
Beginning in Burma (Myanmar) in 1918, the first half of the film follows Edward Abbot (Gonçalo Waddington), a British official who has been avoiding his girlfriend Molly Singleton (Crista Alfaiate) for seven years. A telegram informs him that Molly will be arriving in Rangoon (currently under British colonial rule) the next day, so he quickly flees the situation in a melancholic state. Mixing the elements of a screwball comedy with an extensive travelogue, Edward purposefully creates various setbacks across Asia that obstruct him from being reunited with his fiancée.
In vain of various colonial romances in the early days of Hollywood, Gomes purposefully presents their love story in an asynchronous format. Analogous to Britain's relationship with Asia, Edward is running from an identity while struggling to comprehend the cultures and people he constantly cycles through. At one point, a fading official tells him, "No Western man can understand Asia". His journey, mainly in black and white, is juxtaposed with the colourful documentations of Asia that glide between the main plotlines. Whether its shadow puppets dancing for an impassioned crowd, an acrobat dodging the undercarriage of a Ferris wheel, or the fireworks of the Lunar New Year exploding in opulence across the skies, the camera is more curious than Edward.
Arriving in the film’s second half is Molly: a spunky screwball comedy heroine. She's charming and funny with a much larger lease on life, embracing the sense of adventure as powerfully as Edward reviles it. Her tour finds her at a perpetual arm's distance from Edward—aware of and often shadowing his sprint across Burma, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, Hong Kong, and China.
Molly is personable - befriending ship workers, gamblers, and Vietnamese maid Ngoc (Lang Khê Tran), who offers counsel to her. A prescient mystic warns her of her death and the choice she must make between two men: her absentee betrothed or American cattleman, Mr Timothy Sanders (Cláudio da Silva). She turns down an attractive marriage proposal from Sanders, instead choosing the game of pursuit toward a love that now seems so distant. What proceeds is a story of elusion and dysfunction, challenging truth and documentation.
With cinematography duties divided up between Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Gui Liang, and Rui Poças, the craft on display is mesmerising and represents a less monolithic and Eurocentric eye on Asia. Filmed between 2020 and 2022, Gomes purposefully keeps modern images and soundscapes flowing through the permeable period settings. Whether it is the calm of the Yangtze River in China, Vietnamese chicken dancing through Saigon, or the mythical temples of Thailand: the mostly 16mm film print is not afraid to have the sound of a mobile phone or a modern construction worker creep into the frame. The English-speaking characters played by Portuguese actors never speak English either - the craft's anachronistic artifice is all part of Gomes' thesis.
Grand Tour is made with love by a cineaste, yet Gomes' vast knowledge of the form makes it slightly impenetrable. For all its experimentation, striking imagery, and anachronistic structuring, its elusive story about Europe's historically troubled relationship with the Orient can be overly demanding. It is a film with a grand vision and even grander ideas, but it is a tour that can feel too abstract. There is beauty found in challenging cinema's ability to fabricate the truth, but the film may ask for further interrogation and examination - inviting the audience on a grand tour of their own.
Director: Miguel Gomes
Cast: Gonçalo Waddington, Crista Alfaiate, Cláudio da Silva
Writers: Telmo Churro, Maureen Fazendeiro, Miguel Gomes, Mariana Ricardo, (notes by Telmo Churro, scenario by Babu Targino)
Producers: Filipa Reis, Gregorio Paonessa, Marta Donezli
Cinematography: Guo Liang, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Rui Poças
Editors: Telmo Churro, Pedro Filipe Marques
Grand Tour screens at Perth Festival on 3 - 9 March 2025.
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