Grand Tour – first-look review

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 pre­mière 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.