OBSERVER: Grand Tour
Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s wistful and melancholic film Grand Tour, for which he won the Best Director prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, is a strange meld of cinematic styles, part 1930s old Hollywood, part present-day documentary.
Loosely based on a Somerset Maughan story, the film’s first half follows Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a British civil servant in Rangoon, Burma, in 1918.
The timorous Edward abandons his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate) at the altar. Edward bolts to Singapore, embarking on a Grand Tour of Southeast Asia.
He flees to Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, and Shanghai, each escape precipitated by a telegram from Molly in hot pursuit of her cowardly beloved. In the film’s second half, we follow the tenacious Molly as she dogged trails in the footsteps of her errant suitor.
Superb cinematography is set against often bewildering narrative jumps through time, genres, language, and black-and-white and colour scenes.
Any meaningful encounter is kept at a distance. In one scene in 1918, a cell phone is dropped on the forest floor. When Molly seeks a fortune teller, we see a present-day tarot card reader.
Footage of chaotic Saigon traffic is juxtaposed with a Strauss waltz. Different narrators relay the story, each speaking the language of the country we visit.
The British characters, introduced at the film’s opening with a rendition of the Eton Boating Song, communicate in Portuguese.
“Abandon yourself to the world,” advises a Japanese monk to the oblivious Edward. “The end of the empire is inevitable,” another sage tells him.
Gomes crafts a satirical comparison between a Western Hollywood vision of “the Orient” and the contemporary reality of life in Asian cities. Like Edward and Molly, it seems we continue to view Asia through a superficial, Grand Tour, colonial lens.
Opening in cinemas February 13. Distributed by Potential Films
Review by Kathryn Keeble