The fascinating new film from Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, “Grand Tour,” has been called a travelogue because it features the sights and sounds of several Far Eastern countries, but a study in contrasts is a more accurate description.
With a narrative about a British colonial administrator fleeing a reunion with his fiancée in 1918, the picture is not only a period piece but an ethnographic portrait of the East using contemporary footage. Portuguese actors don’t just play British characters but speak Portuguese as well, while voiceover narration in different Eastern languages relates the peripatetic tale. Scenes in color pop in now and then, variegating the mainly black-and-white cinematography. Plus, the film is cleaved in two when the initial focus on the bounder is juxtaposed with a second half centered on the determined bride-to-be.
While this may sound like a chore, the film is actually an exhilarating, heady viewing experience if one gives in to its panoply of alternately familiar, disconcerting, and curious imagery. Its first few scenes contrast color and black-and-white clips of present-day Myanmar with creamy grayscale historical recreations of a pier and hotel bar as the impulsive groom-to-be, Edward, hightails it to Singapore before Molly, his betrothed of seven years, arrives from London.
Yet it’s not until Edward leaves again for Bangkok, with Mr. Gomes cutting from an “old movie”-style studio interior to a modern-day train track — an editing link Eisenstein would admire — that his stylistic intention becomes clear: to bend space and time with recent footage of Southeast Asian countries mixed in with period scenes, creating a sort of travel documentary slash anthropological “Rake’s Progress.”
The story’s inspiration came to Mr. Gomes, who won the Best Director award at last year’s Cannes film festival, when he read a passage in Somerset Maugham’s 1930 travel memoir “The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey From Rangoon to Haiphong.” Rather than produce a standard period piece, the director and his creative team, along with local crews, also filmed contemporary city and rural life in several countries, including Thailand and China. The toggling between past and present, with Edward and Molly’s journey providing a throughline of location, produces an effect akin to reading an early 20th century novel about colonials in Asia while backpacking across the region in current times.
The film is not solely made up of contrasts, though, as many moments align Edward and Molly’s storylines with complementary contemporary images, such as when the narration tells us that the fiancé plays mahjong with a Chinese family and we’re shown a clip of Chinese players in modern garb. Vignettes of the ancient art of puppetry still being performed today reinforce the idea that what our two protagonists might have seen in the early 20th century resembles some of the sights still present in early 21st century Eastern Asia.
Tradition gives way to modernity, though, when Mr. Gomes highlights an intersection filled with scooters and cars, with the traffic an intricate dance set to, in an apparent nod to Kubrick’s “2001,” Johann Strauss II’s “The Blue Danube.” Scenes of karaoke, extremely popular in Asian countries, are also shown, such as a heartbreaking rendition of “My Way.”
Music binds many of the film’s scenarios and themes, with classical, opera, jazz, ethnic melodies, tribal drumming, a British rowing song, and popular ballads boosting sinuous engagement with the images, whether romantic or banal. Humor, too, gets viewers onto its wavelength, such as when a tranquil shot of petals and leaves on a jungle floor reveals a camouflaged cellphone lighting up with a call.
Mr. Gomez, though, does touch on a few serious issues, like imperialism and cruel customs, as when a character from the past speaks of “controlling the natives,” or when we see modern-day locals prepare roosters for a cockfight. Indeed, more than a few of the latter-day segments include elements of distress and danger, which add to the film’s sense of travel that throws caution to the wind and observation that’s off the beaten path.
Actor Gonçalo Waddington isn’t given much of a chance to develop Edward beyond restless and dissolute, particularly since the visuals and editing are the film’s real characters. Yet when Crista Alfaiate shows up in the second hour as Molly, the actress is able to infuse the character with some personality, even if she blows one too many raspberries at the absurdity of her situation.
Other characters fade in and out, mirroring travel, with only Lang Khê Tran as Molly’s guide Ngoc making an impression. One British official suggests that Asia will always be “strange” to Westerners, and yet Ngoc is gentle, pragmatic, and relatable, as seem many of the rural and working-class people seen in the real-life footage.
“Grand Tour” somehow sidesteps the criticism that it romanticizes the Far East while also ignoring the brutal history of subjugation by countries like England and Portugal, as Mr. Gomes was accused of by some with his look at colonial Africa in 2012’s “Tabu.” The film is so fluid and freewheeling that it’s hard to pinpoint how he does it, yet the artful collision of imagery might be the trick, how he sustains a universal feeling of wanderlust and escape despite portraying mostly unglamorous sites and flirting with sensitive topics.
Comedy, tragedy, sadness, beauty, adventure, drudgery, and the past and present all jostle for attention in the cinematic montage, like on a great voyage or life’s journey.
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