TIFF '24: "Grand Tour" confirms Miguel Gomes has the Magic Touch

by Cláudio Alves

Some directors wish to transcend the artform they practice. Watching their creations, one senses a force pressing upon you, pushing toward a prescribed and somewhat contradicting immersion. Their hands are forever busy, guiding the viewer away from the theater, from their awareness of the cinematic device. Such artists want you to forget you're watching a film. They beckon surrender, but not to cinema. Instead it's to their story, their vision, sometimes their message. And there's nothing wrong with this approach. But there's nothing right either, not necessarily. I know I fell in love with cinema because of its particularities, not in spite of them. So, I don't wish to forget or abstract myself from the lot. Maybe that's why I adore the cinema of Miguel Gomes as I do. 

Regard his filmography and you may realize he is the antithesis of those other cineastes. Moreover, Gomes is all the better for it. If you want proof, look no further than Grand Tour, for which the Portuguese filmmaker won a well-deserved Best Director prize at Cannes…

From Rangoon to the Yangtze River and the bamboo forests nearby, passing through Bangkok, Hanoi, Osaka, Manila, and many places in between, Grand Tour details the same journey twice. It's a duplicated movement, so conspicuous it breaks the film in two and makes the audience keenly aware of the structuring games at play. For the first hour, the camera follows Edward, a civil servant for the British Empire. In the second, it walks beside Molly, his bride, in pursuit of her runaway groom. In many ways, they are a study of opposites, for while the man is strong in body but struggles under the weight of melancholy, his supposed beloved is an unbridled spirit betrayed by a body two steps away from the grave.

Their tales supposedly unravel in 1918, nearing the twilight of the European colonial heydays, but Gomes is only interested in period stylings up to a point. Better said, he delights in them, honing on the theatricality of studio-bound historicisms, costumes that look like beautiful fantasies, and forests half a degree removed from manicured gardens. He delights most in the incongruities the trappings can provoke when juxtaposed with our modern day. As much as Grand Tour is a narrativized travelogue in period drama clothes, it's also a non-fiction poem, stretching the porous barrier between two modes of filmmaking until it's as good as immaterial.

For the past half-century, numerous Portuguese filmmakers have explored these hybrid cinemas. Often, it feels that, in exulting the artifice of the seventh art and contrasting it with unmediated observation, they reach for some sort of hyper-realism. There's nothing faker than the pretension of the 'real' when the camera is present. So, logic would have it that a film admitting the lie outright, calling attention to it, and even celebrating the illusion ought to be realer than the alternative. Grand Tour certainly fits the bill and, through the naked deceit, it finds space for honesty – it might be the most romantic, enchanting, joyfully honest film you'll see all year.

Consider the Babylonish mess the flick makes of language. Putatively, the characters are speaking English, sometimes French and the many native idioms of East and Southeast Asia. Indeed, the two leads come straight out of the same upper-class echelons of British society that populate much of the period moviedom. Yet, Gomes has cast his colonial ensemble from the same pool of actors he often uses, all Portuguese, all speaking in their mother tongue. These outsiders are doubly so, for they're not only pretending they belong to a land that isn't theirs to claim but über-removed from the characters they play, what they culturally signify and represent. 

Slipping into deeper pits of post-colonial cinema, the actual actors are geographically distant from the places the characters intrude upon, too. You see, Grand Tour was shot during the height of the Pandemic, so Gomes had to direct a lot of it remotely. The main cast worked within Portuguese studios, shot in grainy black-and-white celluloid by Rui Poças. Far away, in another continent altogether, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Gui Lang captured the Asian landscapes as they exist today, peering into contemporary lives in alternations of silver monochrome and full-bloom color. The editing makes these registers dance together and apart, pushing away, and, at times, into each other. The sound and eclectic music do much the same.

I can't begin to put into words how beautiful Grand Tour is, but let me try to describe some singular effects. As the camera flows and flies across present-day roads, the sun blasts black and white and glaring into the lens. It's a simple sight, yet rhapsodic. Over these images, others creep in, some in the same ashen palette, while others glow rainbow bright. The device repeats often, and it often brings together what can only be thus joined in cinema. Night meets day, rural afternoons reflect the garish color of the nocturnal metropolis, beacons of modernity clash with traditional performance, forward motion and backward rite. It's watercolor dripping on charcoal-smudged newspaper, the reflections on glass over a centuries-old photograph. 

Edward is incapable of seeing the majesty right in front of his nose, much less the beauty of pure cinema. He is anesthetized to life, capitulated to the late-imperial fatalism of the White Man who came to conquer a land and people it never understood. Above his shadow, "My Way" echoes in the soundtrack with a sinister edge. Or hopeful for another perspective. Molly is certainly full of hope and new eyes to appreciate the world. She can see, even if she doesn't understand. At times, it seems she can take pleasure in the filmic trickery she calls home. You could almost see Molly taking a seat next to you in the theater, silently asking you to bask in the glory of Grand Tour together. There, you can practically feel her warmth, the smile like the sun with which Crista Alfaiate marches through the story in what's surely the role of a lifetime.

Gomes doesn't rehabilitate his heroine or provide some moral absolution from the sins of European colonialism. That's not the point of the film, and such powers are not within reach of any filmmaker. Instead, he proposes a counterpoint and contrast, not didactic in any way, made to be felt deeply in one's heart rather than intellectualized or parroted as praxis. Grand Tour is funny, too, featherlight and curious as a child, so eager to discover new pleasures it puts the common hedonist to shame. At the end, it goes as far as defying the laws of life and death, cosmic orders and all the like. Because in the movies, anything is possible, and we might as well relish its miracles while we can. We'd be fools not to.

Yes, Grand Tour deserves that worn-out critical cliché – it's the kind of film that'll remind audiences why they fell in love with cinema in the first place. It's one of the highlights of TIFF '24 and a crown jewel for the Wavelenghts section. And soon, cinephiles will be able to experience the magic outside festival circles. Grand Tour will be distributed by MUBI internationally. Don't miss it!