“Grand Tour”, a virtuoso journey through Southeast Asia, between reality and phantasmagoria

COMPETITION – At the beginning of the 20th century, a colonial official took flight. Miguel Gomes takes us in his wake. Despite a certain minimalism, a change of scenery is guaranteed.

By Jacques Morice

Published on May 23, 2024 at 5:44 p.m.

Updated May 23, 2024 at 5:49 p.m.

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IThere are films from which we come away with the irresistible desire to consult an atlas. Grand Tour, a most enchanting journey through South-East Asia, is one of them. Burma, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Philippines, China, Japan… this is indeed a great tour. Which takes us across countries but also through the twists and turns of time. In 1917, Edward, a slender civil servant of the British Empire, arrives in Rangoon, where he is supposed to meet his fiancée, Molly, to marry her. But he gives all the signs of a haggard man, in his faded linen suit. Cowardly, he decides to flee, leaving the country to join others, by train, boat, sampan, or transported by coolies.

This colonial fiction, an era recreated in the studio, is superimposed with the greatest naturalness of documentary images, a sort of travel archive, which Miguel Gomes shot himself, 16 mm camera slung over his shoulder, all over Asia. current. The past and the present are one here. The real and the imaginary, ditto. It is these fusions, accomplished in a fluid manner, carried by a particularly romantic voice-over, which contribute to the enchantment.

A gallery of picturesque characters

The film is an exact image of this merry-go-round that two young Burmese boys turn with the sole strength of their arms and legs: fundamentally rudimentary and dizzying at the same time, the wheel turns so fast and high. The director of Taboo (2012) and Thousand and one Night (river fresco presented at the Directors’ Fortnight in 2015) has no equal when it comes to creating a real sentimental adventure with three yen and six escudos, which transports us far away despite its minimalism. Through lush, wild jungle, over mist-shrouded rivers and snow-capped mountains, to cities and towns at the ends of the world. The decadence of the colonial past, the languid exoticism, disease and danger are present. And the “specimens” crossed are not lacking in picturesqueness. Between a scholar speaking about flowers with passion, a Neapolitan tenor, a Vietnamese domestic worker acting as a spiritual guide, an opium-smoking consul, koalas and a moving street singer who carries around his sound system, a change of scenery is guaranteed.

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And Edward in all this? The weakling disappears who knows where in the middle of the film and it is Molly who replaces him. A fanciful woman, this Molly. A heroine full of mischief (she seems to have come out of a crazy comedy) and determined, who sets off in pursuit of her beloved and follows his trail. Suffice to say that we don’t get bored, while being lulled by the music of various languages ​​(Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, etc.). Expressionist black and white, homages to cinema (Fever on Anatahan, India Song ?), the play of light and shadow, the visual rhymes: the drift, because it is one, becomes more and more fascinating as the story tends towards melodrama, without losing its magic. Grand Tour is pure alchemy.

r Grand Tour, by Miguel Gomes (Portugal/Italy/France, 2h09). With Gonçalo Waddington, Crista Alfaiate, Cláudio da Silva, Lang Khê Tran. Competition. Waiting for release date.