Winner Georges Delerue Award for Best Soundtrack
The sixth feature film of Miguel Gomes, the director of Tabu (2012) and the Arabian Nights-trilogy (2014), won the Best Director prize at Cannes this year. Grand Tour is a period piece and a playful hide-and-seek draped in an elegant black-and-white cinematography and a colonial setting and yet, the modern world isn’t really far off as contemporary 16mm footage confusingly seeps in. By jumping through time and space, and alternating fiction and reality without much regard for narrative linearity, the Portuguese filmmaker created a hypnotically beautiful, dizzying love story about a civil servant who abandons his fiancée only to be followed by her across the Asian continent.
In search of love, a melancholic man - on the heels of his fiancée - waltzes through the Asian continent as if in a fever dream.
It is 1917 and we are in Rangoon, in the British colony of Burma. Edward is stationed there as an official of the British Empire and is about to meet his fiancée Molly. Just before arrival, however, he gets cold feet and dives, head first, into a disorienting journey through various countries and regions. After Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Manila, Japan, the Chinese interior and Tibet also pass by. The film then centres on the determined Molly, who pursues Edward but keeps missing him. In search of love, the couple, as if in a fever dream and propelled by overwhelming feelings, waltzes through the Asian continent. But what is a melancholic flight for one turns out to be a roguish pursuit for the other.
Miguel Gomes - who with Tabu snatched the Grand Prix for Best Film at Film Fest Gent in 2012 and was on the festival's programme again with The Tsugua Diaries in 2021 - stays true to his playful approach in his sixth feature film. Don't expect a linear storyline, but rather antics between time periods, continents and characters' worlds of thought. It is a meandering, sometimes demanding journey that rewards you with its clear, overwhelming beauty and surprising humour. His usual sidekicks, Portuguese film stars Gonçalo Waddington and Crista Alfaiate, also reappear.
Gomes beautifully portrays the seemingly contradictory strengths of the main characters. Full of formal risks, as the director uses thoroughly artificial sets with reconstructions of a royal palace, a colonial hotel or a derailed train. He alternates this with documentary footage, shot on 16mm during the corona crisis. It produces a mesmerisingly anachronistic montage that constantly oscillates between fiction and reality and, like the characters and their surging feelings, never stands still. Grand Tour is a dizzying merry-go-round and, spurred on by the timeless powers of cinema, definitely a great adventure. Miguel Gomes once again shows himself a master of sophisticated cinema full of charm and playful innocence. A charm that was savoured at Cannes, where Gomes won the prize for best director.
Image gallery
Credits
Miguel Gomes
Li Kelan, Vasco Pimentel
Gonçalo Waddington, Crista Alfaiate, Cláudio da Silva
Babu Targino, Telmo Churro, Maureen Fazendeiro, Miguel Gomes, Mariana Ricardo
Gui Liang, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Rui Poças
Telmo Churro, Pedro Fiipe Marques
Filipa Reis
Uma Pedra no Sapato
Imagine Film Distribution
More info
Portuguese
Italy, China, Germany, Japan, France, Portugal
2024
