With life, music and transformative clashes between cultures and eras at every corner, the Portuguese maestro’s Cannes Competition entry is a salve for the soul in troubled times.
Our age is difficult; our sorrows are heavy our way through life is hard and stupid. But if you have been feeling a creeping pessimism dull your appetite for adventure into slow poison, Miguel Gomes, that rarest of Portuguese singularities, arrives like a comet across the Cannes competition with “Grand Tour,” an enchanting, enlivening, era-spanning, continent crossing travelogue that may well I’m warning you give you wanderlust for life. “Give yourself to the world,” advises a character of his own creation here, a Japanese monk who tends to walk around with a basket on his head. “And see how much it gives back.” Give yourself over to “Grand Tour” and it will do just that.
Gomes here working with co-writers Mariana Ricardo, Telmo Churro and Maureen Fazendeiro monkeys around in time like a macaque in a hot spring, schleps across countries like a short-legged donkey on a jungle trail; yet somehow also looks down on its own action from such high bamboo as would vex even the most intrepid panda. And all this for what? A slender East Asian jaunt so audacious that we’re not sure why Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), who didn’t want to marry his fiancée of seven years Molly (Crista Alfaiate) when we met him at the beginning of Volume 2 of Gomes’ sprawling “Arabian Nights” trilogy only last Wednesday March 25th decides he doesn’t want to marry her still today Thursday March 26th when we meet him again at Mandalay train station where he shows up drunk at near midnight because she has arrived in town on a steamship.
So we spend most of 1918 not knowing, and it seems that Edward doesn’t either. The only thing he knows is that at Mandalay train station it is almost midnight when he shows up drunk. So the next day, instead of going to pick Molly up from her arriving steamship as planned, his nerve fails him and before he even sees her face he jumps ship to Singapore.
However, he had to keep moving because Molly was chasing him with steady, happy telegrams about her coming. He takes a train that crashes in Bangkok and then becomes a stowaway on a fishing boat to Saigon. In Manila he has “euphoric highs and hangovers” and catches an American warship to Osaka wi th some sailors and sex workers. After being thrown out of Japan on suspicion of spying, he is sent to Shanghai, then into the interior of China, to Chongqing (by some measures currently the world’s largest city), then Chengdu and deeper into Sichuan province, with Tibet as his goal. Whereupon we reach about the halfway point, and turn around to follow Molly instead, hot on the heels of Edward’s cold feet, as she has adventures and romances and setbacks of her own.
This is the story of “Grand Tour,” but it is not half of “Grand Tour.” Gomes’ eccentricity is apparent from the beginning every beautifully rendered black and white period-set interior alternates with bustling bristling contemporary footage of whichever town or country we’re in. Some have changed their names between 1918 and now Burma is now Myanmar Siam is now Thailand but none have changed their spirit, which the seemingly reckless but actually deceptively meticulous construction makes clear.
Sometimes in color, sometimes in monochrome; sometimes with local lingo subtitles spoken by our narrator (this happened years ago) knitting Edward and Molly’s colonial-era stories into today’s Asia always gorgeous life on the fly snapshots of modern life all over the continent. A rickety Rangoon ferris wheel propelled by hand (and foot). Workers untangling wires atop Saigon’s overloaded telephone poles. Old Chinese men playing mahjong; Filipino locals riding tuktuks; Lunar New Year fireworks exploding over the Saigon skyline; a portly man in a restaurant moving himself to tears with his karaoke rendition of “My Way” before returning to his noodles, dabbing at wet eyes.
Gomes also has a recurring motif in the puppet shows that seemingly every culture has developed and developed differently as a storytelling medium. There are marionettes and paper silhouettes and two-person representations of turkeys? Ostriches? Who knows. But that we always see the puppeteers as much as we see their puppets seems appropriate to the sense we get throughout this overflowing cornucopia of worldly pleasures, of a single intelligence, a particular curiosity and a uniquely skewed sense of humor unifying so much that in our darker moods might seem actually to divide us.
Gomes shot this movie in an extraordinary way. A lot of the modern footage credited to three cinematographers in Rui Poças, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Guo Liang was directed remotely due to Covid, while the period segments, whether in bamboo forests or Raffles Hotel or aboard a ship whose captain speaks six different languages over the mooing of a cargo hold full of cows, were creations on a sound stage. But even aside from the occasional deliberate anachronism (a cellphone dropped in a forest when Molly is about to catch up with Edward) and despite the brash collisions of stock and style, scripted fiction and found footage reality, “Grand Tour” is a remarkably coherent if richly complex experience.
In a representative scene, slow-motion Saigon scooters flow through traffic-congested roads as “The Blue Danube Waltz,” the most overused song in the world, plays. These images might be recent, but it’s hardly news that Saigon has a traffic problem. The music is old; using it to score a film is not exactly groundbreaking. And yet and yet! for some reason for many reasons! this instant may well levitate some viewers: those who can fall back in love with the world because of Grand Tour.
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