Miguel Gomes is a Portuguese director, iconoclast and postmodern. His work may seem strange to us if we are used to the "Hollywood diet". However, his idea of adapting W. Somerset Maugham in these times became «Grand Tour», a story of contemporary resonance. In the film someone says that Westerners will never understand Eastern cultures, and the film is the evidence, but Gomes came out of the test with flying colors with the visual and sound solutions he gave to this great journey, for which he was awarded the Best Director award at the Cannes film festival in 2024.
I think many of us may like «Canticle of All Creatures» (2006), about St. Francis and St. Clare; the passionate romance of «Tabu» (2012) and the experimental short «Redemption» (2013); we may find the musical docudrama of country life «Our Beloved Month of August» (2008) or the self-referential film made during the pandemic «The Tsugua Diaries» (2021) rather complicated, but we all agree that he is an author of great wit.
In the plot of the film, set in 1918, an Englishman named Edward Abbott (Gonçalo Waddington) who lives and works in Rangoon arrives in Mandalay in his wedding suit to meet his fiancée Molly, but he suddenly decides to leave Burma and flee to Singapore. At his destination, a telegram arrives from Molly announcing that she will follow him there, so Edward decides to escape to Thailand by train. When the train derails, thanks to a guide and his three wives he reaches Bangkok, but another telegram from Molly arrives there and Edward flees to Vietnam and from there to the Philippines, Japan and finally China. Along the way he meets fascinating people, but Edward's escape, after an hour, becomes iterative, when suddenly, 63 minutes into the film, we do not see Edward anymore and so enters the scene Molly (Crista Alfaiate), a determined and passionate woman who will dominate the rest of the plot and raise the tone and rhythm of the film until reaching the beautiful poetic ending that the scriptwriters gave to these characters with such an ungrateful destiny.
The story of Edward and Molly is inspired by W. Somerset Maugham's story «Mabel», all the details of the trip were suggested by his travel book «The Gentleman in the Parlour. A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong», and I suppose that the allusions to Edward being a spy are based on the fact that Somerset worked for the British Secret Service during World War I. And indeed, the Cannes award is well deserved for the visual and musical resources it proposes: to illustrate each city of the "grand tour" in 1918, instead of giving us BBC-style period reconstructions, Gomes uses contemporary images of each city, suggesting that these stories take place at any time in history.
Gomes combined black and white with colour images, introduced shadow theatre and puppet sequences, and shot in studio scenes in sets of jungles and interiors of mansions of great plastic beauty (thanks to the Portuguese cinematographer Rui Poças, the Chinese Guo Liang, and the Thai Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, a frequent collaborator of Apichatpong Weerasethakul). The musical selection ranges from Johann Strauss II's "On the Beautiful Blue Danube" (1866) to Charles Trenet's "La mer" (1946), in a 1959 version by Bobby Darin, to Gabriel Ruiz Galindo's classic "Amor" (1944), performed by a band of old Chinese jazzmen in the film.
My only complaint is that the film drags on a bit, especially in the montages of modern views of each place on the tour, which is a brilliant idea, but could have used some trimming. However, «Grand Tour» is different, healthy cinema, not a recycling of old vampires or a story of people of confused gender, but a refreshing take on adventure film and romantic drama.
