Metacritic-Rezensionen

It all comes together beautifully, a film to stimulate curious corners of the mind and adventurous parts of the spirit.

A hypnotic and inventive Asian odyssey ... The viewer may not know exactly where Gomes and his characters are headed, but the journey is pursued with wit, imagination and intelligence, and delivers oblique insights about the way we see the world and history.

But for anyone feeling a pessimism creeping in like slow poison and taking the edge off any appetite for adventure, Portuguese singularity Miguel Gomes comes like a comet across the Cannes competition with “Grand Tour,” an enchanting, enlivening, era-spanning, continent-crossing travelogue that runs the very serious risk of infecting you with the antidote: a potent dose of wanderlust-for-life.

The film returns us to a childlike gaze, marveling at a world alive with possibility, where every sight lives on a continuum of meaning.

If Tabu locates the colonial mindset in madness and obsession, Grand Tour does so in cowardice and obliviousness.

It is elegant, eccentric and needs some time to be indulged. ... And yes, it is six parts beguiling to one part exasperating. But ... it leaves you with a gentle, bemused smile on your face.

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.

It is a wholly uncompromising experience that dances with mirth and melancholy. Proving to be evocative in one moment and unrelentingly exhausting in the next, it’s as gorgeous to behold visually as it is hard to completely embrace thematically. And yet, if you abandon yourself to it by the end as one character says, you can catch glimpses of something spectacularly sublime in the vast journey that it takes on.

But for all the luminous beauty of its images, "Grand Tour" sorely lacks a current strong enough to sustain the thoughts that flow between them, compelling as some of those thoughts may be.

Fans of Gomes’ breakthrough 2012 feature, Tabu, will find much to love here as well, and in terms of craft his latest offers some truly beguiling moments. But anyone looking for a good story, or characters to get hooked on, may find themselves admiring the scenery without ever relishing it.