In a variation on his previous films, Miguel Gomes creates a whirlwind epic of male cowardice.
Of the first selection in the Official Competition of a filmmaker whom we consider one of the most talented in contemporary cinema, we were expecting a film that would synthesize the many facets of his protean work, but would also present us with a singular proposition, as Gomes has never ceased to renew himself from film to film. Grand Tour lives up to these expectations.
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From Tabu (2012), we recognize the dreamlike atmosphere of a sumptuous black-and-white film set in the colonial past. Beginning in Rangoon in 1917, the film follows the hurried steps of Edward – Gonçalo Waddington, already seen in Arabian Nights – a British Empire civil servant on the run from his fiancée Molly – Crista Alfaite, a recurring actress in the Portuguese’s films – determined to get her hands on him and the ring on his finger after seven years of engagement. But the man she’s engaged to keeps slipping away. Like a Phileas Fogg or a Conrad-esque hero, he vanishes from country to country: Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, ending up in the Chinese jungle.
Like Tabu, Grand Tour unfolds over two distinct temporalities, each calling on a different aesthetic regime. The fantasized colonial past has been lavishly recreated in studios. Miguel Gomes made the same journey as his two characters, using a smaller crew, a 16mm camera and five weeks of footage of the Asian cities and landscapes they passed through. The result is a marvelous anachronistic interweaving of color and black & white, views plucked from the present, human faces, animals of furs and feathers, and reconstructions of an ethereal yesteryear.
Grand Tour also conjures up an amusing variation on the narrative structure of the filmmaker’s trilogy inspired by Arabian Nights (2015). Unlike Scheherazade, who prolongs her nuptials each evening with a new episode of an infinite fable told to her husband, Edward postpones the celebration by escaping endlessly from one country to the other. And while the film is divided into two parts, the first devoted to the man who flees, the second to the woman who pursues him, they are themselves divided into chapters punctuated by the intervention of a new narrator who accompanies the crossing of a new territory in his or her own language.
In Our Beloved Month of August (2008), Gomes films the summer celebrations of a Portuguese mountain community through a quasi-ethnographic lens, bringing them into dialogue with his own sentimental plot. Opening on the (small) Ferris wheel of a funfair, powered by the sweat of the carnie’s forceps, Grand Tour brings together a host of different artistic expressions. Shadow theater, puppetry, song and music make Grand Tour a spectacle within a spectacle, a film-attraction, a feverish ride through Asian cultures.
On a more trivial note, the film also collides with Gomes’ previous work, The Tsugua Diaries (2021), dedicated to the issue of cinema under a regime of the Covid pandemic and its social distancing. The preparatory journey for Grand Tour was indeed brought to a screeching halt just as it was about to start for its final destination, China, where a strange illness had just broken out. During the lockdown period, Gomes co-directed The Tsugua Diaries with his partner, filmmaker Maureen Fazendeiro – to whom this new film is dedicated and who co-wrote it – while directing a live film crew in China, thus creating an unprecedented directing apparatus through remote work.
In Jonas Trueba’s The Other Way Around, an amusing remarriage comedy seen three days ago at La Quinzaine, a character distinguished films into two categories: linear films and circular films. Grand Tour is certainly circular, but works with a spiralling logic. But it’s also linear, like a game of snakes and ladders in Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord (1981), as it resembles a continent-wide chase.
A dizzying geographical and temporal journey, the film also pays homage to a sub-genre of remarriage comedies, screwball comedy. Pitting an idle, cowardly man against the courage, strength of character and romanticism of his bride, Mrs. Singleton – doomed to remain so – Grand Tour is an eloquent satire of male cowardice.
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