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| Director Miguel Gomes |
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| Gomes with the Best Director Award at Cannes |
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| Gomes with his lead cast |
GRAND TOUR A- Portugal, Italy France Germany Japan China (124 mi) 2024 d: Miguel Gomes
Abandon yourself to the world and you’ll see how it rewards you. —Japanese monk
Winner of Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival of 2024, while also listed at #1 of best films of the year by La Internacional Cinéfila Poll: Best Movies of 2024, and #2 by Cult MTL: Justine Smith: The Best Films of 2024, this well-regarded, thought-provoking film is a loose adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1930 published travelogue, Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong (which may be read in its entirety here: The Gentleman in the Parlour. A Record of a Journey from ...), taking him from Burma through Thailand and Cambodia to Vietnam, traveling by train, riverboat, or by mule through the mountains. Chapter Six (just two or three pages) recounts the story of a man who decides to escape his impending marriage after they had been engaged for 7 years, taking him across Asia as he tries to escape. While Maugham is not exactly a household name anymore, he’s a quintessentially British writer. Filtering his vision through an experimental Portuguese arthouse director may not be the perfect match, and yet it is. Gomes creates a unique, yet exhilarating experience, cowritten with his wife and creative partner Maureen Fazendeiro, as well as Mariana Ricardo, and co-editor Telmo Churro, billed in the credits as the “Central Committee,” introducing a love story of Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a somewhat shy and reserved colonial British civil servant stationed in Burma who at the last minute decides to escape from his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), on the eve of her ship’s arrival from London, set against the historical backdrop of the collapse of the British Empire in the early 20th century. Among the more mysterious aspects is the continually changing voice of the narrators, both male and female, with a different language coming from each new country visited, while equally mystifying is Gomes having his lead English protagonists speak Portuguese. Starting in Rangoon, Burma in 1918, the Asian grand tour was a popular travel excursion by many well-to-do European travelers at the start of the 20th century, some of them writing books about the experience, where it is like venturing into a new world as they travel through various Asian locations, including Burma (Myanmar), Siam (Thailand), Vietnam, the Philippines, China, Japan, and Singapore. What sounds like a humorous film that Wes Anderson would make, with his whimsical idiosyncrasy and darkly satiric edge, nothing sounds more British than an eclectic boating song featured in Charles Crichton’s classic Ealing Studio comedy THE LAVENDER HILL MOB (1951), Eton College Musical Society - Eton Boating Song YouTube (3:26), which might feel more at home in a Monty Python skit, but this becomes more of an exotic experience into the unknown, something along the lines of Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932), or before that Ilya Trauberg’s silent film China Express (Goluboy ekspress) (1929). Gomes, one of the more inventive directors working today, is best known for making the positively enchanting 2013 Top Ten List #4 Tabu (2012) and the backwards cinematic experiment shot during lockdown, The Tsugua Diaries (Diários de Otsoga) (2021), while we’ll pass over his grim, densely constructed 6-hour epic ARABIAN NIGHTS (2015), a confounding, indulgent, and bewildering exploration in three parts of Portugal’s economic crisis that was simply a chore to sit through, inducing plenty of walk outs, including my own. This is a return to the miraculous heights he achieved with TABU, like a spiritual sequel. What that film was to Africa, this is to Southeast Asia, a venture into faraway lands that is unlike anything we’ve seen in years, where there’s an anachronistic quality to the film, with homages to early black-and-white studio movies, and a novel use of interwoven documentary material from the present, yet it doesn’t necessarily have to make sense, as it’s all seeped in a spectacular visual aesthetic that is just fun to watch, revealing what’s possible when cinema is freed from the shackles of a story.
Gomes discovered the Maugham travelogue on the eve of his own marriage, where the newlyweds decided to follow the route of the grand tour themselves before writing the script, filming documentary style as they went with a 16mm camera shooting present day footage that would become the background of the film, a five-week trip that was cut short by the Covid pandemic, forcing them to return before completing their journey, where it all plays out like an exotic dreamscape, where the merging of dreams into ordinary existence becomes a prominent aspect of what films can do, as Gomes seems to specialize in this kind of otherworldy landscape. What takes us by surprise is the overall style of the film, where the continual use of different narrators adds an alienating sense of detachment, as if reading a book, fueled by the magisterial imagery captured onscreen by three different cinematographers working with 16mm, Thai Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who has worked with Luca Guadagnino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Portuguese Rui Poças, who has worked with Lucrecia Martel and João Pedro Rodrigues, and Chinese newcomer Guo Liang. The brightly colored opening sequence is set in the present as we witness the whirl of a hand-operated ferris wheel, with several acrobatic carnival workers climbing up to the top hanging precariously on edge while avoiding the rhythmic motion that potentially engulfs them, while some daredevil has the nerve to swoop under the carriage at its lowest point as if playing limbo before it rises again, one after another, with perfect timing, where his dexterity is simply phenomenal, yet the first thing we notice is that the narration does not match the images, seemingly having a life of its own, suggesting we’re in for a ride. Shifting to free-flowing, dancing puppets on strings, each one connected to a human figure who is kept in the dark behind the screen, yet we’re privy to see, while the sound of pulsating drums conjures up moments of pure ecstacy. In a switch to black and white, like documentary footage, we’re suddenly jettisoned back into the past as workers walk precariously on overhead telephone pole power lines like tightrope walkers as they diligently work on repairs. At some point, we catch up to the narration with a debonair, white-suited Edward waiting at a Mandalay railway station holding a bouquet of flowers awaiting the arrival of his fiancée, but by then we realize how out of sync we are, like a series of kaleidoscopic images that continually changes shapes before our eyes, all of which suggests the infinite power of illusion. Suddenly, without a word of explanation, Edward impulsively flees the scene, giving the flowers away before stowing away on a steamship, then hopping a train that strangely derails in the jungle, 'Grand Tour' - Miguel Gomes - Clip 1 - Cannes Film Festival YouTube (53 seconds), the first of many stops in his meandering odyssey through Southeast Asia, a continent still unknown to Europeans. At first motivated by sheer panic, his mood changes over time, evolving into melancholic reflections, as if contemplating the anguished emptiness of his existence. It’s all a bit discombobulated and hard to follow, like sequences told out of time, as if we’re watching an ever-shifting magic show, with exalted images that linger in the mind, but these few short scenes reveal both an excitement and a wondrous beauty in the art of cinema. Recalling the first Claire Denis film, Chocolat (1988), often blurring the lines between dreams and reality in its blistering examination of colonialism, while also reminiscent of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982), finding ourselves somewhere between an experimental travelogue and a stream-of-consciousness montage, Gomes has created an abstract homage to cinema itself, making this as rewarding and breathtaking as they come. The set pieces of distinct locations were shot on soundstages in Lisbon and Rome, given such a recognizable look of artificiality that Gomes ends his film with a shot of the crew concluding their work.
What follows is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, a kaleidoscopic collage of different languages and cultures, a blend of the past and the present, where recognizable characters come into view, two figures chasing each other through time, where their grand tour comes to symbolize broader themes of identity and purpose, and how easily change affects culture, time and space, and our understanding of history, but we’re guided by spontaneous trips to ticket offices, as Edward always wants to stay one step ahead of the jilted bride who is tailing him. She only comes into play at the midway point, as the story shifts from Edward’s intensely brooding runaway groom perspective to that of his determined and modern bride Molly, who has a ferociously stubborn independent streak of her own, and a silly, somewhat grotesque laugh, not necessarily unhappy with the turn of events, which may seem surprising, as she’s open to the idea of playing this cat and mouse game, traipsing through various hotels, jungles, and temples, traveling on trains and boats, seemingly amused by his attempted escape, always sending telegrams ahead of her impending arrivals, absolutely certain it will all come together in the end. Viewers, however, are not so sure, as what initially feels playful turns ever more dour, as if these characters are lost in their own self-inflicted abyss, mirrored by the last vestiges of the British empire, where the end is inevitable. As Horace Seagrave (João Pedro Bénard), an opium-loving British consul in China says in the film, “We will leave without having understood a thing.” That is ultimately where we find ourselves, where each adventure has a timeless quality, like a self-contained encounter, or like a mosaic in a larger puzzle, reflecting the vastly unexplored existential terrain that offers a ponderous and contemplative perspective, GRAND TOUR de Miguel Gomes (2024) – clip 3 YouTube (36 seconds). There are scenes where people are speaking in foreign languages with no subtitles, as the characters themselves are equally clueless about what they’re saying, which mirrors what one of the characters says, “Asian culture can never be understood by the white man.” Along the way, Molly meets a ridiculously wealthy American cattle baron, Timothy Sanders (Cláudio da Silva), who, after hearing her story, actually proposes to her, but she expresses no interest, yet after a health scare he does offer help in the form of his Vietnamese maid, Ngoc (Lang Khê Tran), who nurses her back to health, and in the process Ngoc becomes a trusted friend. Much of what this film is about is something we cannot see, but exists only internally, like a yearning for freedom, or a deep sense of belonging, where there’s a Westernized romanticization of the colonial era, but also a critique, with signs of disintegrating cracks and limitations, as there’s an unbridgeable gap between the various cultures, just as there may be in this seemingly impossible romance, yet the magic of cinema, along with other forms of art, can bridge these gaps, creating a dialectic between cinema and reality, offering a window into a world we don’t normally see. There is something that approaches the rapturous joy reflected in Richard Halliburton’s extremely popular travel memoir The Royal Road to Romance, first published in 1925, a Princeton grad who circumnavigated the globe with almost no money, traveling through the Khyber Pass, sailing on the Nile, swimming the Panama Canal, climbing the Matterhorn, sneaking into the Taj Mahal at night, or flying to Timbuktu, always in pursuit of the adventure of a lifetime, where one can only sit back and wonder what a long strange trip it’s been. This film has a killer ending, one of the best seen in a while, with a musical cue that in the midst of tragedy just generates a smile, where one of the more outstanding aspects of the film is the prevailing use of absurd humor, and while there are grim aspects, this is far and away the filmmaker’s funniest film, one that delights in subverting audience expectations.
Miguel Gomes on Grand Tour | NYFF62 Film at Lincoln Center artistic director Dennis Lim interviews Gomes following a screening, YouTube (20:55)
