Miguel Gomes’s beguiling new film Grand Tour takes us down to the tour of Southeast Asia through the eyes of a British colonial bureaucrat Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) and his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), as they crisscross Burma, Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, Shanghai and Chinese hinterland. Beautifully shot in 16mm in color and black and white by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Guo Liang (Chinese part) and by Rui Poças (for staged dialog scenes), Grand Tour illustrates the filmmaker's penchant for playing with its cinematic form and historicity, tinkering the boundaries of space and time. And it's delicious.
Based on Somerset Maugham's travel essays collection, The Gentleman in the Parlor, the first half of the story concerns Edward, fleeing impending marriage to his fiancé who is on her way from Britain to join him in Burma. The title card indicates it's the year 1918. The thing is, many of the footage in various places indicate that it's the modern times. That the film is not a period piece and nostalgia trip, swooning over the bygone era. That there is something bigger at work here than the mere silly screwball narrative. Nevertheless, these documentary style footage - a human powered Ferris wheel in Myanmar, Jeepney karaoke in Manila, shadow puppet play in Bangkok, the view from the boat in Yangtze river are all stunning. The dizzying display of places as Edward zips through one place to another, and the rhythm of the tour never slows down. He goes further and further away to avoid seeing Molly, his journey becomes more and more of an existential trip. What is he running away from? Even Edward himself doesn't really know.
The second half of the film is from Molly's point of view. And we repeat Edward's trajectory on the map with her. Molly is a spirited woman, and not the type who gives up easily. With her determination and charm (with a distinctive devilish laugh), she traces Edward's path like a good detective. She picks up dutiful servant Ngoc (Lang Khê Tran) while staying in a palatial house of a smitten American colonialist Sanders (Cláudio da Silva) in Bangkok and continue her journey in the pursuit of catching up with her runaway fiancé.
On the surface, Grand Tour is an old Hollywood screwball comedy of the battle of the sexes. But it's also a rebuke of the inherent male oriented adventure story- a man wants to be free and subservient woman haplessly pursues the love of her life into foreign lands and dies. In Gomes's hands, the artificiality of footage shot in studios of the exotic locale- jungles, a train wreck, colonial homes, etc., rubs shoulders with the 16mm color footage shot on locations is all the more accentuated. Molly is both that lovelorn girl in silent pictures and stubborn, fraternizing modern woman with a charismatic laugh.
Grand Tour exists on its own floating cinematic biosphere outside spatio-temporal continuum where past and present intermingle, in the context of first-world colonialism and the old-world sexism. It's another delicious concoction from Gomes.
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