Hide and Seek
By Leonardo Goi
New York Film Festival 2024:
Grand Tour
Dir. Miguel Gomes, Portugal/Italy/France, MUBI
By the time Edward Abbot (Gonçalo Waddington) arrives at a monastery in northern Japan, the voices that have haunted his pan-Asian odyssey have grown louder, the ghosts all but tangible presences. A civil servant for the British Empire stationed in early 20th-century Burma, he ditched his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), before her ship docked in Rangoon—where the two were expected to get married after seven years apart—and then hopscotched across the continent while she tried to catch up with him, with no success. The journey started on January 4, 1918; as it unfurled, time and space became porous. Before Japan there was Singapore, then Bangkok, Saigon, and Manila, which Edward left aboard an American warship, drinking and singing his way to Osaka. But the mix of euphoria and panic that accompanied his escape slowly mutate into a kind of melancholy. Stranded in the snowcapped temple, Edward finally wakes up to the price of his voyage, the enormous distance that separates him from his betrothed, and the devastating solitude to which he’s condemned himself. He can’t sleep; footsteps, visions, and whispers keep tormenting him. Like the Judge in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, who viewed things he didn’t know as existing “without his consent,” Edwards tells a monk that he doesn’t like phenomena he can’t explain. “Abandon yourself to the world,” the old man replies, “and you’ll see how generous it is to you.”
No line in Grand Tour comes closer to approximating the film’s lust for life than this piece of advice. For a tale of doomed love and excruciating loneliness, Miguel Gomes’s sixth feature isn’t powered by sorrow so much as an inordinate fondness for the world—a film where director and characters alike seem determined to find beauty in the most unexpected places: a roundabout teeming with mopeds in Saigon; rows of paddle fans fluttering like butterfly wings inside a restaurant; the sun slowly rising over a derailed train in the middle of the jungle, prompting Edward, who’s miraculously survived the crash, to marvel at the breaking day like a revelation. Such awe is nothing new to Gomes’s cinema. But in Grand Tour, it is a structuring principle. What kicks off as a tragic romance becomes a portrait of two wanderers who learn to see the universe anew and surrender themselves to it. As in all of Gomes’s works, love for the world is inseparable from the director’s own love for cinema; among many other things, Grand Tour is that rare film that comes close to Amos Vogel’s idea of the medium as a “place of magic,” a machine capable of creating “an openness to wonder and suggestion—an unlocking of the unconscious.”
Clocking in at just over two hours, the first covering Edward’s voyage and the second Molly’s pursuit of her husband-to-be, Grand Tour is littered with present-day shots of life across the cities the couple visit. Which is to say that this is a tale of two journeys: the duo’s (in the late 1910s) and the director’s (a hundred years later). Past and present collide, as do facts and fiction. Scripted scenes filmed on soundstages are punctuated by cityscapes captured in 16mm on two distinct occasions: a shoot halted by the pandemic in 2020 and one Gomes directed remotely in 2022 (with cinematographers Rui Poças, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and Gui Liang taking turns behind the camera). Speaking to Film Comment, Gomes said the script only came after his own 2020 grand tour; penned by the director together with Maureen Fazendeiro, Mariana Ricardo, and Telmo Churro, much of it originated as a response to these images, which for Gomes conjured “the spectacle of the world.” That Grand Tour can make that spectacle so joyous is nothing short of astonishing.
Gomes had already toyed with similar temporal dissonances. His 2012 Tabu, another tale of two lovers chasing each other into the wild, also brought an early 20th-century costume drama in conversation with footage of those same settings today. At their most fluid, both films view cinema as a passageway between different worlds and stories. Tabu began with a Portuguese explorer marching across colonial Africa to flee from the ghost of his beloved, until Gomes cut to an audience of one watching the spectral story unfold from the darkness of a movie theater. Only at the very end does Grand Tour pull back the curtain on itself, ushering Molly out of a soundstage. But the film wastes no opportunity to highlight its artifice. Waddington, Alfaiate, and nearly everyone else in the cast speak to each other in Portuguese—never mind they’re supposed to play a predominantly Anglophone cohort. To boot, Gomes splinters the couple’s odyssey with sequences that might seem designed to yank us out of it. Aside from those abrupt jumps across time and storylines, traditional puppet shows and shadow plays intersperse the trip, as do recurrent shots of trains travelling in and out of the jungle. It’s as if Gomes were charting a genealogy of the medium, tracing its roots in some phantasmic games of lights and shadows. Ostensibly disconnected from Edward and Molly’s chase, however, these moments are neither digressions nor Brechtian ruptures but the work of an illusionist who turns his film into a web where stories can freely spill into each other.
That’s perhaps Gomes’s greatest trick. Grand Tour keeps insisting on the artificiality of its images while reminding us of their power over us. The wizened monk’s advice to the restless Edward was always an invite for the audience to follow suit and surrender to the film’s inebriating rhythms. As befits a story where characters keep falling asleep, Grand Tour lulls you into a kind of reverie, neither waking nor dreaming life, which makes the boundaries between time and space, facts and fiction especially permeable. Such contamination plays out visually as well as aurally. The voiceover narration is relayed in the various languages of each of the countries Edward and Molly traverse, one of the very few unequivocal spatial markers in a film that covers its tracks as fastidiously as Edward. That early scene where countless mopeds swarm around the streets of Saigon—possibly Grand Tour’s most entrancing—begins in a ballroom hundreds of miles away, in Bangkok. While Thai aristocrats and foreign dignitaries twirl to Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube,” Edward skulks away and boards a stowaway boat headed East, before Gomes cuts to the 21st-century Vietnamese city, and Strauss’s portentous strings are momentarily drowned under the metropolis’s native beats. In a film where nothing and no one ever stays still, editors Telmo Churro and Pedro Filipe Marques turn these impromptu choreographies of bodies and vehicles into connective tissue between the lovers’ saga and the documentary-like footage that intersects it. At its most lyrical, Grand Tour unfolds the way it does in this Thailand-to-Vietnam transition: a swooning, uninterrupted dance.
I’m not sure Edward ever truly abandons himself to the world. The brief stint at the monastery does seem to change him though: as he bolts to China and sails up the Yangtze River, his face has grown sadder, his temperament more nostalgic. The last time we hear him talk about Molly is also, judging from the despair that congeals on Waddington’s eyes, the first time Edward realizes he’ll never see her again. Grand Tour itself has changed. The rhythm has grown more contemplative, the shots now last longer—it’s as if the film has become more attentive to the beauty of its surroundings. That attention survives intact in the second part. Grand Tour does not belong to Edward, but to Molly. When the camera first finds her on that Rangoon pier, reading the note he left her before sneaking out of the country, Alfaiate does something Molly always resorts to in times of crisis and incredulity: she laughs. No ordinary chuckle, but a comical sputtering, like an engine running out of steam. And the film laughs along with her. Molly opens up to these mysterious landscapes in a way Edward never does; as soon as she saunters into it, Grand Tour seems to quiver slightly, suddenly alive to the intoxicating force of all these foreign sounds and textures.
Does Molly really believe Edward still wants to marry her, as she tells anyone she brushes shoulders with? Where his restlessness is powered by fear, hers is fueled by curiosity, a heightened receptivity to the stimuli of these far-flung places, something no other Westerner seems to understand, much less experience. Her indomitable thirst for life recalls another fictional Molly, Leopold Bloom’s wife in James Joyce’s Ulysses, whose stream-of-consciousness monologue in the book’s last chapter ends with an orgasmic cry of pleasure. It’s the same jubilant note Gomes here sustains throughout. Whether or not Edward ever heeds the monk’s call, both Molly and his spellbinding film do; by the end, her wonder is ours, too.