“Grand Tour”: a journey across Asia to meet colonial ghosts

The “great journey” announced on the poster of Grand Tour should be taken with a pinch of salt. Its route is the one taken by Westerners at the beginning of the 20th century.^e century in an Asia still under European yoke, starting from one of the Indian cities of the British Empire to finish, step by step, in Japan or China.

We therefore do not follow it in a trivial way. Also, if the reproduction of this route by Miguel Gomes, nine years later the Arabian Nightsproduces very beautiful visions of travel, it would then be appropriate to unfold these, to dissect the pleasure taken in their observation to reveal what it really covers.

1918. The pretty and candid Molly (Crista Alfaiate) arrives from England in Rangoon, Burma, to meet her fiancé Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) for their wedding. But when she arrives, the young woman only finds a letter. His fiancé, who fled to Singapore, claims to have been obliged by a business trip – in truth, the foggy English civil servant does nothing more and nothing less than hangs out in the bars of the British colony.

The game of cat and mouse is launched, which will take the couple from Saigon to Tokyo via Bangkok or Hong Kong. Each time, when one arrives, the other has already packed up. This pas de deux in the “flee me, I follow you” mode leads Miguel Gomes to open his trip to Asia like a picture book, partly honoring the tourist promise formulated on the surface.

A film shot partly remotely, in the midst of a health crisis

More Grand Tour is in truth an “accidental” film, like the train which runs aground in the middle of the jungle, further confusing the already lost Edward. A film shot partly remotely in the midst of a health crisis, with Gomes remotely controlling a Chinese film crew from Lisbon on the last leg of the journey. A film, above all, thought from the start as a pile-up of images of scattered natures.

Where it would be necessary for the whole of Asia to ensure the accomplishment of the colonial epic of Edward and Molly, it is the countries themselves which ultimately really interest Gomes. Almost neorealist documentary views impose their contemporary artifacts – scooters or smartphones – on a fetishized past inherited from Hollywood. And recordings of folk entertainment, shadow theater or puppets filmed in color, including Grand Tour becomes the unexpected archivist, introducing other imaginations into the fabric. Along the decadent slope of the story, the cardboard decorations end up revealing their falsity, similar to the landscapes of the visual artist Noémie Goudal.

These back and forths from one visual regime to another complicate the figurative situation induced by the story of this couple, all in all anecdotal, and give Grand Tour a rare riot in the cinema. There appears, towards the end, a very beautiful character, Ngoc (Lang-Khê Tran), servant in the house of a rich owner, who opens his world to Molly. Upon contact, the film confirms what the viewer felt from the start: the essential thing here is in the surroundings.

Grand Tour, by Miguel Gomes, Portugal-Italie-France, 2 h 8