You’ll struggle to define this film. Best just go along for the ride

Like other movies by Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, the award-winning Grand Tour is easy to watch but hard to categorise. Among other things, Gomes describes it as a “dysfunctional” romantic comedy, inspired in part by Hollywood classics such as Bringing Up Baby – although its lead characters are kept apart.

The film, which won the best director award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, is also an exotic adventure story, but one that invites us to question what we mean by the whole idea of the exotic. There’s also an element of documentary that contrasts with the film’s surreal, fantastical elements, including constant shifts between the world of a century ago and the present.

This multi-faceted film began life more than five years ago, when Gomes picked up a copy of The Gentleman in the Parlour by the British writer W. Somerset Maugham, an account of his travels in South-East Asia in the 1920s. What caught Gomes’ imagination was an anecdote occupying a few pages in the book, told to Maugham by a club secretary in a small village on the road to Mandalay.

It’s the story of a colonial administrator in Burma (now Myanmar) who hears that the woman he was engaged to back home in England is on her way to meet him. Deciding that he can’t go through with the marriage, he flees, leaving her to follow him from one country to another.

With this as a starting point, Gomes says, he and his writing collaborators prepared an outline for the film, in which Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) is pursued by Molly (Crista Alfaiate). But before writing the script, Gomes and a skeleton crew set out on a journey of their own, following the itinerary of the couple in Maugham’s book.

Starting out in Myanmar, the Grand Tour team travelled through Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and Japan, capturing documentary footage wherever they stopped. The original plan was to end up in China, but the pandemic brought the trip to an early halt – the Chinese footage in the film had to be shot later by a local crew, with Gomes directing remotely.

In the finished film, all this material is blended with a transparently fictional reworking of Maugham’s story shot in a studio, following Edward and Molly on their journeys through these same countries – imagined as taking place in the 1910s, when Britain and other colonial powers still held sway over much of the region.

Grand Tour is an exotic adventure story.

Typically for Gomes’ work, the film is a game played with the imagination, in a number of different respects: the filmmakers imagining the past, the West imagining Asia, and locals in the present-day sequences imagining what Western visitors like Gomes and his crew might want to see.

“I was aware that by doing this film I was putting myself in a dangerous position, because we cannot do a film dealing with these things in the same way they were doing in Hollywood in the 1930s,” Gomes says. “But I have the conviction, the idea, that there is a very important dimension in fiction that is dealing with this kind of thing, the exotic.”

Rather than shying away from the risks, he says, he and his team made a point of seeking out “cliched, touristic images” in each country they visited: tuk-tuks in Bangkok, a Chinese dragon, puppet shows everywhere. “A kind of superficial, cliched idea of what is iconic in each country.”

Anais Lin Chastres, Suraya Shaharin, and Haneen Rahim in Grand Tour.

This ironic, self-conscious approach acknowledges that the reality of life in any country is not something a foreigner can hope to capture on a brief visit. Still, Gomes is aware this doesn’t entirely get him off the hook. “You can have the problem of this Occidental gaze at Asian culture, which is reducing the complexity of this world and only getting this very superficial, iconic thing, which cinema was doing for many years.”

In his own defence, he argues that part of how the imagination works is precisely by seizing upon superficial, iconic images. He points to the puppet shows that recur in Grand Tour: are these authentic forms of cultural expression, or spectacles manufactured for the tourist trade?

It’s hard for an outsider to be sure either way. But regardless, in this context the whole notion of authenticity is open to question – since the nature of any kind of puppetry is to give us a stylised, even stereotypical picture of the world.

“The delirious, excessive, out-of-the-world, bigger than life … this is the basis of created fiction, of the imaginary,” Gomes says. “I think that I must not censor myself, saying ‘This is too typical.’ No, I want to be typical. Anyway, I’m not Vietnamese, I’m not Chinese, I’m not Japanese, so let’s grab these stereotyped images and let’s do something with this.”

Gonçalo Waddington plays a man running away from his fiancee in Grand Tour.

Gomes is neither Asian, like the people his main characters encounter, nor British like them, which means that Grand Tour is dealing with foreignness in yet another sense. Here too there’s a playful blurring of lines: although it doesn’t make strict sense within the fiction, the Portuguese actors playing the British Edward and Molly speak Portuguese, something Gomes insisted on when his producers hinted that casting English-speaking actors might help at the box office.

“I like this idea of doing the opposite of what Hollywood did many times, Roman emperors speaking with the accent of Brooklyn,” he says. “In Grand Tour, Portuguese is English.”

The device is also a reminder that Portugal has its own history of imperialism, although Grand Tour doesn’t address this as directly as Gomes did in his 2012 film Tabu, set in the 1960s in an unnamed African country still under Portuguese rule.

“We cannot escape our history, so in a way we have to deal with these things,” Gomes says, speaking of Grand Tour. “In this case, it was not really on purpose – I am not obsessed by colonialism. But it’s certainly there.”

Layers of potential meaning are evident everywhere in Grand Tour, but much is left open to interpretation, including the significance of the soundtrack selections, which again have an aspect of deliberate cliche.

“It’s the music of Finding Nemo,” Gomes says wryly of Bobby Darin’s 1959 recording of Beyond the Sea, which imagines how a pair of parted lovers like Edward and Molly might be reunited on a far-off foreign shore. “To try to construct something using these very iconic things in another context is part of my work.”

In making their own journey beyond the sea, Gomes says, he and his crew had two main goals: to seek out things they could recognise, and at the same time “to be confronted with a lost sensation of surprise”.

Many of the images in the film do indeed feel both familiar and surprising, especially when we reflect on what symbolic meanings they might carry – like the ferris wheel in Myanmar that operates without a motor, with workers lying beneath the gondolas and pushing them upward.

“The wheel spins because of the weight of the body, so the people who work on this wheel are almost like acrobats,” Gomes says. “We try to have the spectacle of the world.”

Grand Tour is in cinemas from February 13.

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