A visually ravishing if emotionally and thematically opaque travelogue is the latest from Portuguese maestro, Miguel Gomes.
Earnest ethnographic documentary, steamy backlot melodrama and the existential travelogues of Joseph Conrad coalesce in another cinematic UFO from Portuguese filmmaker, Miguel Gomes, a quixotic and occasionally-exasperating treatise on how the west distorts and romanticises its cultural depictions of the east. Its high-profile premiere in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival made for an interesting bluff for anyone who thought the pathfinding director had embraced the mainstream, as Grand Tour is quite possibly his most experimental and emotionally opaque feature to date.
Very much a continuation of the concerns and production methods employed to make previous features such as 2012’s Tabu and 2015’s epic Arabian Nights trilogy, there’s perhaps a whiff of unwanted familiarity to the way the film attempts to forcibly conjoin the fiction and non-fiction forms, and on the back of a single viewing, it was difficult to discern a purpose to this high-wire mode of storytelling. That’s not to say that the film is without its pleasures, as each shot offers a surprise of eccentric audio-visual juxtapositions that seem to operate on their own off-kilter and intuitive internal logic, and there’s also a light scattering of Gomes’ Martini-dry humour across proceedings.
Manderlay, 1918, and effete British bureaucrat Edward Abbot (Gonçalo Waddington) decides, for reasons that are never stated, that he will jilt his estranged lover, Molly Singleton (Crista Alfaiate), at the alter and ride the rails, roads and waterways wherever they take him, perhaps until he’s able to comprehend these obscure impulses. His “tour” takes him through Bangkok, Shanghai, Manilla, Osaka until the point where he’s curled up in a bamboo forrest, giant pandas in the near vicinity, and melting away with an opium pipe in hand. Along the way, Gomes gently leans on anachronism by sliding in documentary inserts resembling TikTok tourism (albeit with higher production values) which almost exclusively focus on local storytelling custom, such as puppet shows, folksong recitals and theatre performances – indeed, Grand Tour assiduously catalogues the range of ways out there to tell stories as it also tells its own.
A mid-point reset introduces us to Molly with her bonnet hat, toothsome smile and silly rasping laugh and we discover that she, with the same lack of logic as her betrothed, intends to track her errant beau on his jaunt and, one presumes, convince him that they should go back and tie the knot. We now have the same journey from Molly’s perspective, which sees her reject a mysterious and rich admirer in favour of continuing her wacky search for Edward. There’s always the nagging sense here that the ripe central storyline is the aspect of the film that Gomes and his writing committee (Mariana Ricardo, Telmo Churro and Maureen Fazendeiro) are least interested in, and unlike with Tabu, he gives us very little to be able to truly invest in the characters and their seemingly random peregrinations.
The film’s spry literary voiceover switches language in tandem with each new destination, emphasising the notion that all stories are different depending on who’s telling them, and where they are. Yet Grand Tour never settles on a tone or an obvious seam of enquiry that allows for a satisfying entry point into the often-dazzling material, its most successful moments of primal emotion coming from its ironic use of pop and classical standards. There is definitely some of the old Gomes magic here, but things just doesn’t feel as potent or intoxicating as usual.
Published 22 May 2024
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