Portuguese director Miguel Gomes won over critics and audiences with Taboo in 2012. He goes even further with Grand tour which mixes color and black and white and interweaves the eras in a colonial Burma of 1918, but also contemporary.
Miguel Gomes transcends the rules to take us into a great cinematic dream, in theaters Wednesday November 27, 2024.
Of breathtaking pictorial beauty, all in reference to melodrama, the king genre of early cinema (the action begins in 1918), Grand tour does not, however, function in a nostalgic mode, but reflects a cinema of rare modernity.
This is not the least of the paradoxes that inhabit a film off the beaten track which reconnects with the origins of the seventh art.
In Rangoon (the largest city in Myanmar, formerly Burma), Edward, a British subject, flees the city where he was to marry Molly that same day.
Convinced that he is the man of her life, she sets out to find him by following the “Grand Tour” that many British people took around Asia at the dawn of the 1920s.
Miguel Gomes is a work of pictorialism as he takes care of his setting and his lighting, without being ostentatious or formal, but flattering the eye with his beautiful compositions. The costumes, the sets, the framing, moving from square to panoramic format, add to the diversity by shimmering the eye. But without ever formal abundance to the detriment of the story. Simple in itself, but always revived, intriguing, if not mysterious, as the song said Chinese nights (Louis Lynel in 1922): “Chinese nights, cuddly nights, nights of love, nights of drunkenness, of tenderness”. That's all Grand tour.
A geographical, temporal and sentimental change of scenery inhabits the film. Miguel Gomes reconnects with a narrative mode that seemed lost; we find it with the greatest pleasure. Not out of nostalgia, but as a reunion. Grand tour revives the strength of original cinema, in the sincerity of its cinematography, a vector of plastic and sentimental emotions. Great movie.
Genre :Drama comedy
Director: Michael Gomes
Actors: Gonçalo Waddington, Crista Alfaiate, Teresa Madruga, Jani Zhao, Lang-Khê Tran, Manuela Couto, Joao Pedro Benard, Cláudio da Silva
Pays : France/Italy/Portugal/Germany/Japan/China
Duration : 2h08
Sortie :mErcredi November 27, 2024
