Grand Tour
In Miguel Gomes’ idiosyncratic, playful black-and-white saga, a man flees across Asia to escape his fiancée.
Image courtesy of Mubi.
Born in Lisbon in 1972, Miguel Gomes is a filmmaker who is clearly an artist in the sense that all of his films are personal expressions, works that speak for him. Such people often write their own screenplays but it is a feature of Gomes's work that he has colleagues who regularly make their own contributions, writers such as Telmo Churro, Mariana Ricardo and Maureen Fazendeiro. All were involved in Grand Tour and Churro not for the first time also had a role in the editing of it. Even so, with such works as Our Beloved Month of August (2008), Tabu (2012) and his Arabian Nights trilogy (2015) Gomes has created a series of films which are so idiosyncratic that one thinks of them as quite distinct from the work of any other director.
After seeing two earlier films by Gomes, I came to the conclusion that he was a romantic who seeks new forms to validate afresh that approach to life. Grand Tour proves to be a further example of that although it is a film in two parts and only the second makes its romantic nature apparent. Indeed, the first hour is told from the viewpoint of Edward Abbot (Gonçalo Waddington) who in contrast to that is in flight from the woman, Molly, who has been his fiancée for seven years and who remains eager to marry him. The year is 1918 and Edward is a British civil servant working in Rangoon. When we meet him, he is taking a ship to Singapore where at the Raffles Hotel he encounters Molly's cousin, Reginald (Jorge Andrade). On hearing that Molly is on her way from London, Edward, uneasy about marrying, promptly takes a train for Bangkok as representing the place that is furthest away. As it happens, there is a derailment but Edward presses on with his travels going to Saigon, Manila, Osaka and Shanghai and ending up in a remote region near Tibet. At times it suggests something of a shaggy dog story with each episode in it handled with a light touch and possessed of a forward momentum that makes it continually engaging.
But Grand Tour switches halfway through and it then becomes the story of Molly (Crista Alfaiate) as she travels along the same route followed earlier by Edward. She is portrayed as a figure driven by her love for Edward and it now becomes apparent that Grand Tour is a romantic work. That fact, the colonial period setting and the locations made me see the material as somewhat akin to Somerset Maugham’s novel The Painted Veil. That work was filmed for the second time in 2006, a decent remake but one that nevertheless felt dated in every sense. This can certainly be seen as validation for the approach adopted by Gomes whereby his romantic tale emerges from within a framework so stylised and unorthodox that it would be labelled by many as avant-garde. Inevitably it is a mode which, present in one form or another in all of his films, makes Gomes a filmmaker whose appeal will be lost on many but if one becomes attuned to it there are many rewards, albeit some frustrations too.
The first part of Grand Tour engages by being extremely well photographed and by being so unusual that one is kept happily alert by having no idea at all as to what will come up next. Despite the later change of tone, two features that will apply throughout are established very early on. One of these is the film’s blend of documentary footage and fiction which, since it also involves a play with time, takes away the sense of Grand Tour being simply a period piece. In point of fact, ahead of finalising the exact form of the film and working with the actors, the filmmakers themselves set off on a journey taking the same route that their characters were to travel although this was cut short when Covid struck. Nevertheless, much contemporary footage was shot in colour which would later be cut into the enacted scenes which would be in black and white.
The other key feature – perhaps even more important – is that the film consciously presents the narrative as a narrative. This is a means of playing on the extent to which we humans have a need for stories and it echoes the fact that in his Arabian Nights trilogy Gomes references Scheherazade and her use of stories to survive (it is striking too that those films involve two distinct periods in that Gomes has claimed that he was reworking ancient tales to comment on Portugal in the 21st century). Here story-telling is made a focal point: not only does the colour footage include shots of puppeteers telling tales in their own way but quite a lot of what happens to Edward and Molly is told by a series of voice-over narrators. When normal dialogue takes over it is significant that the language is not always the correct one: in particular the two main characters despite being English speak in Portuguese. This lack of authenticity serves as a further reminder that this is a tale being told and that we are hearing it in the present day.
Grand Tour is very much its own creation, its two halves being stylistically related despite being so contrasted in tone. That lightness of touch in the first half makes it very distinctive and a line about having a fever (it is described as "delirious but serene”) seems at this stage to fit perfectly the character of the film itself. But with Molly’s appearance the emotional side of the story takes over and the focus is now on Molly's resolute devotion to her belief in Edward even if the tale now introduces a new character, Timothy Sanders (Cláudio da Silva), an American who falls in love with her. He is so patently a decent man that one could regard him as a better husband for Molly. But love is love and disregards such facts, just as it can lead to Molly pursuing her own ends at a selfish cost to others. Romanticism may win out here but the film is not blind to darker elements.
It remains to note one other quality in the work of Miguel Gomes which is notable throughout Grand Tour and that is his ability to use sounds to maximum affect. It very much extends to his use of music as was also shown in his earlier films. Here there is no music score as such but, just as ‘Perfidia’ became a theme tune in the Arabian Nights trilogy, he uses existing pieces to memorable effect. Early on he incorporates the Eton Boating song which, heard in a colonial setting, might have been intentionally ironic or biting but which is instead generously handled to suggest the innocence of someone like Edward growing up unquestioning in the early 20th century. Then we have a karaoke performance of 'My Way’ by a local in a bar in Manila (Lary Baron). You would expect a parodic element here, but not at all. And when for once there is just a hint that Timothy might come to mean something to Molly that is captured through the use of an old recording of ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’. Best of all when it comes to song is the decision to feature as the accompaniment to the film’s final embrace of romanticism regardless of tragedy Bobby Darin's recording of ‘Beyond the Sea’. These moments are great and, while 129 minutes is a long running time and can sometimes feel it even for those sympathetic to Miguel Gomes and his style of filmmaking, Grand Tour although more uneven than Tabu is a work that has his unique signature all over it.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Gonçalo Waddington, Crista Alfaiate, Cláudio da Silva, Lang Khê Tran, Jorge Andrade, João Pedro Vaz, Joana Bárcia, Teresa Madruga, Giacomo Leone, João Pedro Bénard, Kazuo Kon, Lary Baron.
Dir Miguel Gomes, Pro Filipa Reis, Screenplay Telmo Churro from a story by Mariana Ricardo, Telmo Churro, Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, Ph Rui Poças, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Gui Laing, Pro Des Thales Junqueira and Marcos Pedroso, Ed Telmo Churro and Pedro Filipe Marques, Costumes Silvia Grabowski.
Uma Pedra no Sapato/Vivo Film/Shellac/Cinema Defacto/The Match Factory/Creataps/Rediance-Mubi.
129 mins. Portugal/Italy/France/Germany/China/Japan/Spain. 2024. UK Rel: 18 April 2025. No Cert.
