Rangoon, Burma 1917. Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), an official of the British Empire, runs away from his betrothed Molly (Crista Alfaiate) who arrives from London. During the journey, Edward’s panic gives way to melancholy, while Molly, determined to get married, chases him into a grand tour Asian, an experience in vogue among the European elite at the beginning of the 20th century.
Competing at Cannes 77, it is Grand Tour by the Portuguese Miguel Gomes, already appreciated for The Arabian Nights (2012) e Taboo (2015) and here co-produced by the Italian Vivo Film.
Work hindered by Covid, so that at a certain point the director had to supervise the intended Grand Tour in South-East Asia remotely in his native Lisbon, Gomes used 16mm footage shot in Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan and China as archive material “in reverse” for a story from a hundred years earlier: a nice idea, alienating and, yes, philosophical.
If this temporal pastiche were not enough, the studio parts, carried out in Italy and Lisbon, and the puppetry inserts, which abstract the spaced pas de deux of Edward and Molly, so adhering to the canons, are valuable. screwballin an uber-historical, almost allegorical, ineluctably paradigmatic dimension, where male cowardice and female self-determination are stamped as gender traits – and therefore stereotypes.
But in Gomes, which starts from Somerset Maugham (The gentleman in the living room) to meet the climate of Lav Diaz and even the warbles of Wong Kar-wai and the relationships of Kim Ki-duk, there is a dramaturgical complexion, a narrative ease and a poetic transfiguration with few equals, capable of manipulating with grace and clarity not only the visible, but the timeable, making of Grand Tour return to the future and, moreover, time machine. Above all, an elegy of a device, Cinema, irreducible to reality, devoted to the imagination, granted to the dream. Not for everyone, but one Grand Tour precious.
