By Sandra Hall
GRAND TOUR
★★★
M. 129 minutes. In cinemas February 13
Grand Tour, which won its creator, Miguel Gomes, the Best Director Award at Cannes last year, is baffling. It’s also weirdly compelling – a mash-up of Asian travelogue, colonial satire and ill-begotten love story.
Gonçalo Waddington plays a man running away from his fiancee in Grand Tour.
It’s awkwardly wrapped around a road and sea trip which has Edward, (Goncalo Waddington), a low-ranking British diplomat, fleeing Rangoon in 1918 and winding up in China via Bangkok, Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan. He is avoiding a reunion with Molly (Crista Alfaiate), the fiancée he hasn’t seen for seven years, because she’s coming from London to marry him and the prospect terrifies him.
This may sound relatively straightforward in a roundabout way but Gomes and his collaborators play around with your perspective by using Portuguese dialogue and punctuating Edward and Molly’s separate journeys with clips of the countries they visit as they are today. What’s more, the decidedly eclectic soundtrack features hits by Gene Vincent, Trini Lopez and Frank Sinatra. It’s as if the pair are spicing up their itinerary with a bit of time travel.
Gomes was inspired to set off on this odyssey after reading Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour. It gave him the bones of the story as well as dictating aspects of its style, which has an odd literary tilt. Large chunks are covered in voice-over by unnamed narrators. The big dramas either happen offscreen or we arrive a little too late to experience the full effect.
The hapless Edward is handsome and as ineffectual as you might expect and he soon becomes prey to thieving guides and other unscrupulous characters but just as you’re getting thoroughly impatient with him, the narrative point-of-view makes an abrupt about-turn to focus on the indomitable Molly. She has decided to pursue him and her adventures prove to be a lot more lively.
A lesser woman, for example, might have given in to the desires of the rich American landowner (Claudio da Silva), who proposes marriage to her but although she’s charmed by him, nothing is permitted to interfere with her search for the elusive Edward.
The film’s rapid mood changes are as arbitrary as everything else about it. Molly’s raucous snort of a laugh is incongruous as well as bizarre and while Gomes is out to make fun of British colonialism, the message isn’t exactly sharpened by the fact that his targets are all played by Portuguese actors speaking Portuguese. As well, a sudden injection of tragedy amid the mayhem seems to be tossed in purely for shock value.
Is there a point to it all? I doubt it. Even the film’s most ardent critics advise you to just go with the flow wherever it takes you. I was totally disoriented for most of the time but never bored, mostly because I was fully absorbed in the task of trying to work out what on earth was going on and why.
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