Awash in romantic melancholia and feverish longing, GRAND TOUR is the latest feature by Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes (TABU). The film’s titular expedition begins in 1917 in the Burmese capital of Rangoon, where downbeat British diplomat Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) is due to meet his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate), arriving after a protracted, long-distance betrothal. Instead, he panics and flees, hopping a ship to Singapore and setting off a series of Asian peregrinations, each increasingly laden with doubt, hangovers and existential anguish. Meanwhile, the more sanguine Molly responds to her sudden abandonment with good faith, humor and Katharine Hepburn–like brio, determined to track down and marry her bashful beau. Sending Edward missives along the way, Molly’s continental pursuit reveals both a burning ardour, and the sway of the lingering vestiges of certain colonial empires.
Wedding contemporary documentary fragments with dazzling, painstakingly detailed sequences shot on a soundstage, the kaleidoscopic images toggle eras, cultures and styles in a bifurcated, wildly ambitious travelogue. Situated between artifice and actuality, GRAND TOUR is a feat of visionary filmmaking whose sooty expressionism harkens back to the golden age of silent cinema and rightly garnered Gomes the Best Director award at Cannes. It’s a magnificent excursion that reminds us of cinema’s singular ability to interrogate and refine our positions in the world. (Synopsis from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival)
“If Chris Marker and Preston Sturges ever made a film together, it might have looked something like GRAND TOUR…. A film to stimulate curious corners of the mind and adventurous parts of the spirit…making you remember what cinema can do.” —Rory O’Connor, Film Stage “For anyone feeling a pessimism creeping in like slow poison and taking the edge off any appetite for adventure, Portuguese singularity Miguel Gomes comes like a comet…with GRAND TOUR, an enchanting, enlivening, era-spanning, continent-crossing travelogue that runs the very serious risk of infecting you with the antidote: a potent dose of wanderlust for life.” —Jessica Kiang, Variety “GRAND TOUR is a movie of unorthodox sweep and diffuse grace…. It presents the everyday with a sense of wonder, undercutting what would have been the exoticizing gaze of its early-20th-century lens while reminding us that, yes, reality is often magical and inscrutable.” —Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine
