Presented in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, Grand Tour by Miguel Gomes does not disappoint the premisespromises, it takes us by the hand and takes us around Asia, in a narrative flow with a suspended rhythm and dazzling stratification, in a very fertile temporal, linguistic, aesthetic and artistic short circuit. A tour de force also productive, international, which mixes the documentary inspiration of Asian landscapes and the amazing work on sets, costumes and everything that follows created in the Bel Paese. Cinema out of time, pure cinema.
I traveled each and every highway
Rangoon, Burma, 1917. Edward, a civil servant of the British Empire, runs away from his fiancée Molly on the day she arrives to get married. During his travels, however, panic gives way to his melancholy. Contemplating the emptiness of his existence, the cowardly Edward wonders what became of Molly. Determined to get married and amused by Edward’s move, Molly follows in her footsteps on this grand Asian tour… [sinossi – pressbook]
…and so it will be until one day,
old and tired will fall ill in one of those small mountain villages,
and too weak to be carried back downstream, he will soon die.
– The Gentleman in the Drawing Room, W. Somerset Maugham.
From the crocodile of Taboo to the panda of Grand Tour the step is not that short. In between there is everything: the rise of Miguel Gomes, the pages of W. Somerset Maugham, an Asian tour for filming and a European and international one for money, Covid, cinema. There is color but also – and above all – black and white, super 16mm, theater in many of its forms and declinations, documentary inspiration and filming on soundstages, the past and the present, the extremely refined taste for storytelling. There is, truly extraordinary, a passion for the cinema of the past, for the Dofor a seventh art that still exists tangible. Presented in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, Grand Tour it is a world-work, a renewed declaration of intent, an artistic manifesto that comes from very far away, in time and space, and which promises us not to give up ground. Because, in the end, having metabolized computer graphics and completely unprepared for the next revolution of artificial intelligence, perhaps the Brigadoon of the seventh art, this sort of intermittent immortality and original fidelity, is precisely contained in this cinema so otheryet in its own way popular, entertaining, emotionally engaging and aesthetically generous.
Then, of course, it’s not comfortable promenade small town Grand Tour. Fortunately, it isn’t even a Ginzburgian forced march up the mountains. The cinema of the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, also on the river The Arabian Nights – Arabian Nightsasks us only to let ourselves be carried away by the thousand streams of its layered narrative, by the saraband of inventions, intuitions, detours.
A detail, one of many. A shot and reverse shot. We are in a post office in Saigon. The shot of the counters is clearly contemporary, there is no attempt to modify it, make it up, make it go back in time. The reverse shot, just in a snap of the fingers, reminds us of the magic of cinema, that fiction that we blindly believe in (like the backdrops of The Wizard of Oz), making us suddenly return aesthetically to 1918, to that narrative plane which is (appears) totally immersed in the time of Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) and Molly (Crista Alfaiate).
It’s a love film Grand Tour. More loves, more variations. The cowardly one of Edward and the stubborn and slightly crazy one of Molly, obviously. But not only that, because the stories intertwine like destinies and peep out, reverberating, on other screens: the pre-cinema sheet of silhouettes, but also the bizarre dance of seduction that perhaps could have stopped Molly’s journey, probably no longer loved by Edward but certainly loved by the wealthy Timothy Sanders (Cláudio da Silva). And who knows what loves the improvised karaoke singer missed, driven to tears after his appreciable version of My Way… in short, stories, destinies, romantic trajectories, now ancient, perhaps impossible today. A romanticism that springs from old pages, from travel diaries, from feats never accomplished, imagined, written, staged. Are we or are we not in the middle of a forest? Yes, but also no. Gomes’ other great love is for cinema. His journey, his story, can only be true and fake at the same time. Burma, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, China, but also the Roman studios, the jungle that becomes fake and yet real. And the last destination, Tibet. We, a bit like Molly, are called to follow him, to follow him blindly despite everything, infatuated by this way of making cinema that seems to have come out of a Shangri-La theater. But will there be cinemas in Shangri-La? Maybe yes, after all there are cell phones in Edward and Molly’s jungle.
Like a new Phileas Fogg, Gomes brings home his tour of the world, giving us a sort of (post)colonialist mapping of East Asia. What was yesterday, between the two world wars, with the sprawling power of England, France and also Portugal (and not only), and what is today, an undoubtedly freer horizon. In this sense, the relay of narrative voices that change from nation to nation, from language to language, is even moving. Undoubtedly a shrewd, fully political choice – like, after all, Gomes’ cinema. And then the pandas, the monkey bath in the spa, the monorail, the waltz and the opera, the costumes and sets (what work!), the great natural landscapes and city traffic, the bright colors of the fireworks artifice and the pitch black night of the forest, love, life, death. Reality and fiction. Miguel Gomes is Oscar Diggs. He is the Wizard of Oz.
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