Watching Miguel Gomes’s epic globe-trotting adventure, one could be forgiven for assuming the film is adapted from a forgotten 20th-century classic. The Portuguese auteur behind the equally ambitious Arabian Nights trilogy and his co-writers, including Telmo Churro, Maureen Fazendeiro and Mariana Ricardo, tell a story that could have come from the pen of W Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene or Joseph Conrad.
The film’s story, set at the end of the first World War, revolves around Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), an English diplomat who, following a seven-year engagement, hops on the first boat from Rangoon and leaves his fiancee, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), on the day they are to marry.
He ruefully contemplates his desertion of her as he journeys through Bangkok, Saigon and Manila. At one point he holes up in a Japanese monastery, but the authorities expel him as a suspected American spy.
Meanwhile, his indomitable bride-to-be, with the spark of a classic screwball heroine, doggedly chases him across Burma and Siam, all the way to the Tibetan border.
Exquisite period images, shot in 16mm monochrome, are punctuated by contemporary Asian tableaux of karaoke, bustling markets and a man-powered Ferris wheel.
This documentary account of the film-makers’ own grand tour is shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s regular director of photography, who is one of the film’s three credited cinematographers.
Gomes, who was deservedly named best director for Grand Tour at Cannes last year, playfully collapses the time periods. Strauss’s Blue Danube plays over images of bike traffic in Ho Chi Minh City. The Eton Boating Song serves as the soundtrack’s anthem of the British empire.
Part of the magic of Grand Tour is that we forget Waddington and Alfaiate’s very British characters speak Portuguese throughout. It is a film of many enchantments.
Grand Tour is on Mubi from Friday, April 18th
