Like his 2012 masterpiece Tabu, Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour uses the transition from the silent to the sound era to explore the passage into a post-colonial situation, employing deliberate anachronisms to undercut the imperialist — and in this case Orientalist — trappings of empire. Nominally set in 1917, the film opens in Rangoon, where Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a British civil servant, is awaiting his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate), who is set to arrive in the Burmese capital after a long-term engagement. When he impulsively hops on a boat to Singapore to flee the impending marriage, however, it becomes just the first stop in a meandering odyssey that will eventually take him to Bangkok, Manila, Tokyo, and Shanghai, among other locales. In the first of the film’s two parts, we follow Edward’s harried peregrinations; in the second, we follow Molly’s intrepid pursuit of him. Throughout, we are made aware of the disjunction between these twined journeys of the colonial imagination and the myriad realities screened out in the process.
The clearest strategy Gomes employs to this end is his interweaving of the film’s dominant black-and-white 16mm palette with contemporary documentary footage shot in color (the latter credited to no less than three DPs). An early passage in Rangoon shows a set of local amusements, such as a small ferris wheel powered not by an automated mechanism, but by two young men kicking and shoving it along. The implication here, at least in part, is not merely the persistence of pre-industrial technologies, but also their continued appeal to the eye of a Western tourist. Perhaps more significant, though, is the way Gomes employs disjunctions between image and sound within the frame itself. The most notable instance of this is a sequence where slowed-down footage of motorcycles and cars rounding a traffic circle in Vietnam is set to the “The Blue Danube,” suggesting a perspective that would equate a journey through Asia with a Kubrickian space odyssey. But there are other, less bombastic instances as well. Apart from her great beauty, Molly’s most notable feature in the film is her uniquely unflattering laugh, which, in showing us what we might have heard if we were present during silent film productions — particularly with those actors who failed to make the transition into the talking era — points up also to the darker histories of early ethnographic filmmaking. Similarly, the fact that all the British characters in the film speak in Portuguese points to the film-historical vagaries of translation, subtitling, and dubbing, and the inevitable infelicities of such practices.
Arguably the most intriguing aspect of Grand Tour, however, is the way it explores — and exploits — our sense of time, which remains unstable throughout. The sight of the human-powered ferris wheel in Rangoon, or of an open-air hotel in Singapore, for instance, may well have existed in 1917, whereas the view of towering skyscrapers in Shanghai, or of a cell phone dropped in a bamboo forest, immediately pulls us into the present day. And as we follow Edward and Molly across the continent, such anachronisms proliferate. The cumulative effect is to prompt us to continually reconceive how we are meant to link together, both spatially and temporally, the various stops of this Asian “grand tour.” In so doing, Gomes points up to the unstable conditions under which we are even capable of placing ourselves within a historical timeline. If Grand Tour nonetheless stands as a lesser entry in Gomes’ body of work, however, it is because the film does not, in the end, do much more than gesture. The film’s peripatetic structure was significantly shaped by pandemic-era constraints, with Gomes directing various passages remotely and recreating others on artificial soundstages — but for all its concept-forward flourishes, it mainly resonates for how its production rhymes with the touristic gaze of Edward and Molly’s journey. Like a second-rate magic act, it leaves one not with a lingering sense of wonder, but only with a faint curiosity about how the trick was done.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 4.
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