“Asian culture can never be understood by the white man,” opines one sage character in Grand Tour, the latest product of cinematic exploration from Portugal’s cine-poet Miguel Gomes, and along with Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides the most experimental title in Cannes’ 2024 competition.
But no one is trying to understand Asia in this humorous tale about a British civil servant who runs off from Rangoon, Burma in a blind panic when he learns his fiancée is arriving to tie the knot. With the blind arrogance of colonialism, the betrothed blithely track through jungles and temples, traveling on trains and boats, though Burma, Thailand, Singapore, Shanghai, Saigon and Japan – passports are an option when you have money – with Molly in comical pursuit of Edward, like two characters in an old-fashioned silent movie.
Obviously Grand Tour is a much more complex film, the story being just an excuse to explore filmmaking. Gomes is a director poised between ironic narrative and experimentalism pure and simple, and his films (often described as strange, lyrical and hypnotizing) divide audiences into the visionaries and the unconvinced. His last work to tour festivals was Arabian Nights (2015), over six hours of cinema divided into three feature-length “volumes”. The reasonably contained length of Grand Tour and its romantic, mysterious atmosphere of exoticism, which recalls the director’s 2012 Tabu (also in black-and-white), should earn more festival attention and hopefully a better-grossing theatrical release for its European co- producers. (The remark of an official to Gomes in Arabian Nights Volume 1: The Restless One is pertinent here: “The meagre resources of Portuguese cinema are incompatible with your reveries.”)
Here the multiple locations and impeccable camerawork and editing give the film a costly look. Yet the original shooting was done on the cheap by Gomes in early 2020, when he spent five weeks tramping across Southeast Asia with a 16mm camera, shooting footage that would become the background of the film. The story was created later, to pull the pre-filmed material together narratively. Of course, a lot of what is on the screen escapes the main narrative and simply appears as an attractive bauble, like a romantic Viennese waltz played over a slo-mo ballet of modern motorbikes circling around, which has no relation to the story at all. Other examples abound, like the repairmen who walk electric lines like a tightrope, or a youth who shows off his skill riding a ferris wheel from the outside, holding on with his hands. Maybe these tacked-on scenes relate to the inscrutable Orient, but more likely they are outtakes from Gomes’s trip.
Set in 1918, at the tail-end of World War I (no one mentions that the world is on the cusp of change, but it is worth holding in mind), the main story opens on the lanky, feckless young Edward Abbott (Gonçalo Waddington), a British civil servant in Rangoon, on his way through the pouring rain to meet Molly Singleton (Crista Alfaiate, the Shahrazad of Arabian Nights), the fiancée he hasn’t seen in seven years. But he is no longer in the mood for love – in fact, he can’t remember what she looks like – and seconds before meeting her train, he jumps on another one bound for Singapore.
Another train Edward is on derails in a colorful scene in the middle of nowhere. Passengers take the accident in stride and look for alternate means of transportation. As we later learn in the second part of the film, which could be called Molly’s Story, his determined fiancée is not far behind. Edward finds telegrams from her waiting for him in Bangkok and Saigon, along with other remnants and stragglers of the British empire hanging out in hotel bars. At last, he finds asylum with a group of Japanese monks who wander between temples high in the mountains and wear a basket over their heads, but even in those days there was no good place to hide.
Molly’s journey is saved for last. It paints a fuller picture of this exceptionally stubborn woman, whose refusal to give up in the face of overwhelming evidence impresses the wealthy Mr. Sanders (a stern Claudio da Silva). Though she refuses to marry him, he helps her recover some of her energy in his beautiful jungle mansion and gives her the Vietnamese girl Ngoc (Tran Lang-khe) to nurse her. The final scenes have her travelling upriver on the stormy Yangtze river, past towering gorges and giant Buddha statues, to look for the man who rejected her, which happens to be precisely the plot of another film in Cannes competition this year: Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides. Coincidence?
Director: Miguel Gomes
Screenplay: Telmo Churro, Miguel Gomes, Mariana Ricardo, Maureen Fazendeiro
Cast: Crista Alfaiate, Goncalo Waddington, Claudio Da Silva, Tran Lang-khe, Joana Barcia, Jorge Andrade
Producers: Marta Donzelli, Gregoio Paonessa, Filipa Reis
Cinematography: Rui Pocas, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Gui Liang
Editing: Telmo Churro, Pedro Filipe Marques
Production design: Thales Junqueira, Marco Pedrozo
Costume design: Silvia Grabowski
Sound: Vasco Pimentel, Kelan Li
Production companies: Uma Pedra no Sapato (Portugal), Vivo Film (Italy), Shellac Films (France)
World Sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In English, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese
129 minutes
