Portugal, Italy, France, 2024
Directed by Miguel Gomes
With Gonçalo Waddington (Edward), Crista Alfaiate (Molly), Cláudio da Silva (Timothy Sanders)
The titular touristic itinerary used to be made in Asia by well-off travelers from the British Empire, taking them through a string of great cities of the continent’s southeastern and eastern parts, a costly, fashionable, and dazzling adventure experienced in posh grand hotels and thanks to convenient modern transportation means, celebrating the beauty and diversity of a distant world carefully managed, exploited, and staged by a Western society regarding itself as the most powerful and remarkable on Earth.
This past is lived again in the present, memories of anecdotal history prodding a filmmaker, director Miguel Gomes, inspired by remarks writer Somerset Maugham jotted in one of his books, to make the same extended journey, with only a vague sketch in mind to craft a narrative but feeling it was important to see firsthand, and to record, whatever is now on the ground along the fabled route. Thus, this grand tour is first a personal experience and a reportage before being a fully-fledged fictional film – but the grand tour fiction painstakingly includes the images taken in the filmmaker’s own grand tour.
But visually the film is even more of a complicated tapestry than a blend between the current-day Asia and a plot taking place in 1918. Anachronisms swiftly impinge on the twists of Edward’s story, with for instance images of a typical train of the early 20th century which has derailed preceded by the ringing of a mobile phone and the image of a hand seizing the high-tech object lying on the ground, among the herbs and the debris. Edward would walk, ride motorbikes, sail, with the same, worn-off clothes fitting an adventurer of the early 20th century even if he is surrounded by modern-day people carrying on with their lives in the bustling streets of the 21st century – though these brief encounters occur in a stream of adventures whose other characters clearly belong, through clothes, attitudes, and language, to the 1918 era.
Even the scenes involving the present prove rather complex. Part of them are records of traditional puppets performances of various kinds relating old tales of gods, goddesses, magical creatures, distinguished nobles: through entertainment, the present basks in the past, or rather the past keeps the present under its spell. And cinematography fast stops short to be clearly delineated. If colors are linked to the present while the story is shot in black and white, they are less and less systematically used and the present time can also be shot in black and white, whether Edward wanders there or not.
This delicate black and white cinematography, completed by a few well-known bygone visual tricks like a funny, if fleeting, use of the iris shot, is a conspicuous tribute to the silent era and befits a story taking place in 1918. This is still a talkie, but with big twists. In a very literary fashion, the story is told by an omniscient narrator, only they are actually as many narrators as they are stops in the hectic journey of Edward, and they do not speak the language of the lead character or of the film’s creators – they speak their own native languages and as a consequence, in addition of Portuguese and a smattering of English, the audience can hear Thai, Vietnamese, French (the native tongue of Vietnam’s colonizer), Japanese, and Chinese. Even though it revisits a fixture of the colonial life and deals with a couple of subjects of his Majesty the King of England, the film relies on the voices of the once colonized populations to tell the story, in a distinctive critical move echoing the urge to display the traditional tales and puppet shows alongside the very Western elements of the story and the very Westernized traits of the modern Asian streets.
Duality does not concern only chronology or technology or narratology. The very story of Edward deals with a diplomatist who is engaged but runs away from his fiancée, an odd comic tale of a couple who cannot get united because the man is afraid of both the woman and the commitment, while the woman stubbornly pursues a man she still thinks devoted to her and unable to deceive and disappoint her. It becomes in the middle a clearly two-part narrative with the second half in part mirroring the first and centered on Molly, the feisty young lady Edward is so keen to neglect, even if he is aware how unfair he is to her and wonders how she could feel, a belated remorse that is the trigger shifting the film from one part to the other.
Their itineraries, however, differ. If Edward hops from Burma, now Myanmar, to Thailand, and then to Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, and finally China, Molly, after falling ill, lingers in the former French colony and then moves straight to the Middle Kingdom. Filled with surprising encounters with original, even downright oddball, travelers, they share the same nonsensical and silly kinds of humor, which could vaguely brings to mind the American screwball comedies of the 1930s, whether it is the foolish tricks and bumbling improvisations of an Edward always on the run feverishly trying to escape Molly, to cross at any cost boundaries and to hide away as safely as possible, or the stubborn ideas and resolute attitude, come what may, a Molly constantly bursting out laughing and annoying folks. Each time it is hard to guess how it could end, though reasonable expectations call for a kind of reunion.
This is where the film astonishes. It is not simply it denies the time-old happy ending (that the Asian tales also favor by the way). Edward’s fate is left in the air: he is abruptly dropped off the frame and never returns, stuck in a distant Chinese province, perhaps wistful, perhaps happy, perhaps cut off from his native world forever. Molly’s fate is more complicated: there is a hint at another possible romance, as she gets noticed, pursued, but also crucially helped by a Vietnam-based English businessman, Timothy Sanders. But she remains steadfast on her goal, taking eventually a chance with a challenging journey through forbidding areas of China, defying the dangerous waters of a river and political clashes, turning thus her story from a funny epic to a far somber trip to what could be her heart of darkness. Indeed, her fate, clearly spelled out, is a deeply tragic and poignant. But, oddly enough, it gets a twist reminiscent of the finale of director Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 feature “Ta’m e guilass – Taste of Cherry”. In a way, it may not be entirely illogical in a wider endeavor shifting from one element to another of a given duality and started as a travel picture made for the filmmaker’s curiosity and interest that the fiction’s crew steps into the story of the fictional characters – only it is hard to get Gomes’ point, especially as the resurrected Molly does not behave as an actress coming back to real life but as a fictional character now in the hands of wise peasants.
More broadly, the film stirs a mixed reaction. It is not hard to fall under the spell of this constant reinvention of cinematic forms, staple plots, and exotic and colonial clichés playfully sniping at the imperialist ethos (after all, even if the British Empire is the locus, Gomes can still remember his own native country had an Empire that extended across the globe and clung to the last possessions till the bitter end in the 1970s, a Portuguese Empire he mocked in his 2012 film “Tabu”). And another pleasure lies in the way it also investigates as merrily and stunningly that embarrassing gap between men and women when it comes to the meaning of love and romance. It is like a jigsaw puzzle getting build with wit but also perception, tinged with a vibrant palette of feelings, from fun to nostalgia to ultimately a searing sense of the human tragedy.
But on the other hand, the construction can feel not at all as messy and lively as it could have been feared. It rather look too carefully and too conspicuously crafted, a self-conscious exercise constantly catching the audience off the guard and eager to take on any cinematic, romantic, political conventional point. The characters remain too much of an absurd riddle – unless they are just too schematic. The very fear of Edward is hard to fully understand, and thus his story lacks elements allowing to relate to him more strongly – unless it is just a primal reaction, and then he is a bit thin and ridiculous. It is harder to put up with the laughing of Molly and what befalls on her till the end more stretches belief than fosters sympathy. This is a grand tour that is more intriguing than seductive – and yet still a visually beautiful and refined creation.