A runaway groom with his bride-to-be in hot pursuit takes us on an epic tour through colonial-era Asia in Miguel Gomes’s playful Cannes prize-winner which mingles the artificiality of classic cinema with a documentary sense of place.
Bristling with life and song and revelatory collisions between cultures and timeframes, the Portuguese master’s Cannes Competition title is a healing balm for trying times.
Grand Tour 2024
Merging the old-school cinematic elegance of his charming festival favourite Tabu with the semi-documentary stylings of Our Beloved Month of August or his epic Arabian Nights, the latest from eccentric Portuguese director Miguel Gomes takes us on an exotic journey zigzagging not just throughout Eastern Asia but also through space and time. Grand Tour earned Gomes the prize for Best Director at Cannes as well as widespread critical acclaim.
In Rangoon, Burma, 1917, British civil servant Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) waits on the docks to meet his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate) but faced with sudden cold feet he impulsively jumps on the nearest steamer, headed for Singapore, instead. When he discovers Molly isn’t far behind, he begins a “grand tour” around Asia, fleeing through Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan and China in quick succession to avoid his bride-to-be.
Gomes shoots scenes with his actors on sound stages in the style of classic 1930s cinema and even though his very British characters seem to have been ripped from the pages of a Somerset Maugham novel they always speak Portuguese. Instead of shooting the entire film in this fashion, Gomes bridges the story with contemporary documentary footage of the exotic locales Edward and Molly travel through accompanied by an amusingly sardonic voiceover in a variety of Asian languages. The poetic marriage of melodramatic artificiality with found footage reality plays with both time and geography in a truly unique fashion, but unlike the film’s hapless betrothed, this marriage is a beguiling success. — Michael McDonnell