A story that mixes black and white and color, past and present, reality and fiction, to tell a journey through Asia, at the beginning of the 20th century and today. That is the proposal of the Portuguese Miguel Gomes with ‘Grand Tour’, a film that pleased and disconcerted in equal measure at Cannes.
“The story takes place in 1918 but we are in 2024,” it is not something that can be ignored, Gomes said in a press conference in which he explained that the ideal of the film came from a travel book that he read a long time ago and that told the story of a man in Burma (present-day Myanmar) who had fled his marriage.
That made him think about the Asian version of the ‘Grand Tour’, the popular trip that between the 17th and 19th centuries took travelers to tour Europe. In the east, that journey began in some country of the British Empire and ended in China.
With these two ideas in mind, Gomes began to prepare the film, although with a process contrary to the usual one, the director highlighted in the presentation of a film with which he is competing for the Palme d’Or at the festival.
At the beginning of 2020, together with the production company Filipa Reis, began that Asian Grand Tour trip that was to last five weeks to record current images of the tour. In February, the pandemic interrupted the journey, which ended in Japan, so the Chinese side had to film it remotely.
Gomes wrote the script based on recorded images of the sites they found on the trip. “The normal thing is to write the script and then find the financing,” acknowledged the director, who in this project sought to “create transitions from one world, that of cinema, to the other, the real one.”
The contemporary images of Asia prolong what the characters are experiencing, explained the director, for whom the film is a kind of “scrawball comedy” – sophisticated comedies like the ones he made Katharine Hepburn– about how cowardly men are and how tenacious women are.
Compared to the documentary style of current images in Asia that look like the surprised gaze of a tourist, the fictional story set at the beginning of the 20th century was recorded entirely on set.
In that part, Goncalo Waddington plays Edward, a British civil servant in Rangoon, who panics about his upcoming marriage and decides to flee before the arrival of his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate). And he embarks on a journey that takes him throughout Asia while the woman chases him.
Gomes jumps from fiction to reality and from 1918 to the present day, relying on the play of black and white and color, with a narrative that has been described as “eccentric”, “disconcerting”, “dreamy”, “delirious” or “a balm for difficult times” by specialized critics.
“This film is about belief, someone who apparently does not have many beliefs and who has a woman who seems to have many but not reasonable ones,” said the director, who considered that viewers should be allowed to draw their own conclusions.
“In cinema, too many efforts are made to impose their own reality, viewers are treated like children,” said Gomez, whose objective is precisely that those who watch his film can travel “with the main character” and be “active spectators.”
A film with a very marked style that Gomes already showed in previous works such as ‘That Dear Month of August’ (2008) or ‘Tabú’ (2012) and that is not easy for everyone to understand. For example, the online magazine Deadline says that “less enlightened viewers may want to bring a pillow” to watch ‘Grand Tour.’
Source: EFE
