'Grand Tour' Review: A Doomed Romance in Colonialism's Twilight

Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour takes its title from an established travel itinerary known as the Asian Grand Tour, a popular option with Westerners seeking a broad but surface-level introduction to the continent in the early 20th century. Proceeding from Mandalay to Rangoon (present-day Yangon) to Singapore, and then on through Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, and Osaka, before ending in Shanghai, the tour was ideally designed to satisfy the era’s popular taste for Eastern exoticism in an efficient, tourist-friendly package.

It’s easy to see the appeal for Gomes, a director for whom boundaries of space and time have always been ripe for cinematic manipulation. Grand Tour retraces the steps of the journey with the imagination and playfulness of his best work, indulging its globetrotting impulses while casting a satirical eye on its uncomfortable basis in colonial conquest.

Gomes’s film actually takes its titular tour twice, utilizing a diptych structure that will be familiar to fans of the director’s Tabu. Set in 1918, the first half of the narrative follows Edward (Gonçalo Waddinton), an English colonial functionary in modern-day Myanmar fleeing the affections of his fianceé, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), who’s sought him out in Mandalay after a long period of estrangement. The second half, naturally, then follows Molly’s dogged pursuit of her man, arriving at each locale just after Edward has departed (while the characters are English, the actors and their dialogue are Portuguese). With each leg of the journey, a new narrator enters to comment on the action in the corresponding native language.

The duality of the narrative carries over to Grand Tour’s form, which toggles between studio-bound period recreations and contemporary documentary footage of the cities the characters pass through. (The studio scenes were shot by frequent Gomes collaborator Rui Poças, while the remainder of the film was shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Gui Liang.) Much of the film is predicated on the distance between the sumptuous sensuality of the former—recalling Josef von Sternberg’s approach to similar material—and the dialectical framework provided by the latter.

Gomes mines the strategy for some amusing juxtapositions. For one, when Molly seeks a priestess to read her fortune in Saigon, we see a present-day tarot reader in comparatively drab surroundings, stripped of the seductive mysticism we might expect from the scene. But Grand Tour isn’t content with drawing facile connections between past and present, nor with hammering home an obvious point about the colonial gaze of classical Hollywood-style exoticism. Indeed, Gomes’s aims are more elusive, as he presents images at opposite poles of documentary and artifice and asks what each reveals and obscures, how a conception of the past mediated through cinema echoes through the modern world.

As in Tabu, there’s an equation of the doomed romance and the colonial twilight in which it takes place, but the tone here is predominantly comedic rather than tragic. Gomes has likened the main couple’s dynamic to a Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant who never share the screen, and Edward’s neurotic fear of attachment and Molly’s headstrong vivacity both fit the bill (there’s even a Ralph Bellamy figure in Cláudio da Silva’s wealthy American suitor). Gomes pays tribute to these influences while exposing their undercurrents of anxiety. (Elsewhere, a train that calls to mind von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express is quickly derailed.)

If Tabu locates the colonial mindset in madness and obsession, Grand Tour does so in cowardice and obliviousness. Edward’s comedy of embarrassment eventually leads him to an older, opium-addicted colonial relic who speaks the film’s most direct lines: “The end of the empire is inevitable,” he tells Edward, and that Westerners like him will never truly understand the land they occupy. True to the film’s tone, the observation is presented less as a grave profundity than as the opiated musings of a fool adrift in time, but the sentiment is undeniable.

Molly, for her part, brings an indomitable optimism that borders on delusion throughout Grand Tour. Aware of and unperturbed by Edward’s flight from her, she responds to each bit of bad news with the same unforgettable sputtering laugh. The charm of Alfaiate’s performance pierces through Gomes’s conceptual construction, but by the film’s end her laugh feels less defiant than deluded. Molly, too, ends up lost in the foreign wilderness, her convictions curdling into a madness that her native companions inevitably bear the brunt of.

Ultimately, however, Grand Tour is less concerned with dissecting history than with the cinematic apparatus that interprets it. Beyond its winking homages to classical Hollywood, Gomes pays tribute to his own cinematic heritage with the inclusion of legendary Portuguese actors Diogo Doria and Teresa Madruga (both leads of Manoel de Oliveira’s Francisca) in bit parts. Even if the film’s construction never quite achieves Tabu’s perfectly calibrated poignancy, its consistent sense of excitement and discovery are a marked improvement over the stifling academicism of Gomes’s previous The Tsugua Diaries. For all of Grand Tour’s distancing effects, it never loses sight of the pleasures that drive us to the cinema in the first place.