The new picture from visionary Portuguese director Miguel Gomes is an unstuck-in-time journey that toggles, narratively at least, between languor and urgency. Opening with documentary-style footage whose saturated color suggests small-gauge celluloid and depicting hijinks on a Ferris wheel somewhere, it seems, in Southeast Asia, “Grand Tour” shuttles back to the early 20th century. In Singapore, a white-suited Englishman named Edward, a Clark Kent type played by Gonçalo Waddington, navigates the docks and their peddlers of sundry wares seeking nothing but escape.
Not escapism, mind you, but literal escape—he’s fleeing his fiancée, whom he feels unready to marry. He consults with a fellow Englishman in the vicinity of Singapore’s famed Raffles Hotel, founded in 1887 and named for the British diplomat who helped shape Singapore, not the fictional thief who, in any event, didn’t debut until 1898. Point being that Edward, whilst enacting the grand tour of the title—a travel agent’s chalkboard gives its stops as Rangoon, Singapore, Bangkok, and Hong Kong—is traversing both British colonial and Asian history in his journeys.
The Englishman is unsurprisingly heedless of this. Gomes doesn’t even bother to make the character (or the fiancée who arrives in the movie’s second half) an English speaker; these characters speak Portuguese, while the Asians primarily speak in their own languages. Communication isn’t often a problem because it isn’t desired.
The color and, soon enough, occasional black-and-white footage (which appears to have been shot largely in the present day) gives viewers a glimpse into what a character like Edward would necessarily miss during his self-centered pursuits. And had, of course, made his grand tour almost a century later. For instance: A beautiful backlit shadow-puppet show. Tour buses with karaoke as an added attraction, and an impassioned reading of, what else, “My Way.” Fireworks displays. And more.
And an hour in, the fiancée arrives. Crista Alfaiate plays Molly, and she gives her character a distinctive snorty laugh. Not reason enough to duck out of a marriage contract, but you never know with some people. Not at all a model of diffidence, she intends to get her groom even if she has to “drag him by the throat,” she declares. The movie’s focus shifts from Edward’s cowardice to Molly’s indomitable spirit. And in doing so, and going deeper into a South Asian jungle, grows richer and stranger.
Viewers looking for a tidy narrative and gratifying conclusions will come up short with this movie. But if you can roll with atmospherics that are their own reason for being, “Grand Tour” has plenty, and they’re all beautifully realized.
