THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
1918. Edward Abbott, a young British civil servant stationed in Rangoon, learns that Molly, to whom he has been engaged for eight years, plans to join him. He decides to leave, beginning a journey that will take him from Burma to China, via the Philippines, Japan and Vietnam. The young woman, refusing to believe that he ran away to escape marriage, goes looking for him, meticulously following his tracks in the places where he has passed. Each journey is punctuated, for the two Westerners, with unforeseen encounters, that of a boorish American billionaire who suddenly fell in love with Molly, that of an old opium-addicted consul or a Catholic priest who has lost his faith, for example.
The screenplay, even if the British writer is not credited in the credits, is the adaptation of a very short story by Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), one of those stories tinged with melancholic irony about a background of colonialism conscious of its vanity and its finitude. If in any case we had to tell “what the new film by Miguel Gomes is about” – returning to the cinema after the shock that was, in 2015, his trilogy The Thousand and One Nights Then Tûoa’s Journalfilmed during confinement, in 2020 – this is perhaps how it would be possible to do it. Without being able to explore a formal and sensitive experience which has no real equivalent in cinema today.
Conceptual puzzle
Originally, there were documentary images taken by Gomes and his team during a trip to Southeast Asia, shots without a preconceived scenario and filming interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. On arrival, the discursive redistribution of material is then placed at the service of an original narration. Unless it is the opposite, that is to say the recomposition of a romantic plot adapting to pre-existing images. Grand Tourwhich won the prize for best direction at the Cannes Film Festival, is a tragi-comic, picaresque and epic story, as much as a mixture of sensations, a geographical and mental trip, a conceptual puzzle. Halfway through, the story takes us back by changing its main character, going from the man on the run to the obstinate young woman, from the escape to the quest, from the present to the past.
By alternating black and white and color, the studio sequences, in which the actors evolve in the heart of a deliberately artificial space, and those filmed, today, on the very places that they supposedly crossed the protagonists, the filmmaker tinkers with a deliberately confusing filmic object. The journeys made by Edward Abbott and Molly are narrated by various voice-overs, each with its own musicality, in the language of the country crossed. The spectator is thus summoned to take a ride on the small Ferris wheel (there is one, particularly artisanal, operated by hand, metaphorically filmed from the first minutes) of the irreconcilable feelings of the characters, the denial of the young woman and, perhaps, the anxious immaturity of her fiancé.
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