LANG KHÊ TRAN IN GRAND TOUR

MIGUEL GOMES: GRAND TOUR (2024) - NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

A 'dreamy Asian travelogue' is poetic cinema and exoticism

There is almost no fixed pretext for the constant traveling in Gomez's Grand Tour, and that, as it were, is the point. This is a journey whose theme is "Let's get lost." We are immediately plunged into exoticism, or orientalism, but in a gentle sense, plunging into the Far East at its most bizarre, a mondo cane where the cane is a pedigreed shiatsu.

The one dodgy low-level pretext is escape, because Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a frumpily movie star-handsome man with good hair and variable outfits, doesn't want to get married, and he's fleeing his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), who somehow finds out where he's going and sends a telegram to say she's on the way, whereupon he sneaks off somewhere else. Telegrams, because this is 1918. But Gomez is not too pinned down by that, or by plot developments. There are period images and contemporary ones. He is more interested in providing a living, on-scene cabinet of wonders as Edward flees quietly from Mandalay to Bankok, thence to Shanghai and beyond, with imagery swinging back and forth betwen then and now and from mostly black and white to occasional color. It is sometimes simply documentary, but even then the film's characters appear in the scenes.

Memorable moments: We get a good look behind and in front of the scene of Thai shadow puppets; a sweeping Strauss waltz is played not as in Sokurov's Russian Ark for ballroom dancers at the Hermitage Museum, but for a busy square full of sweeping, undulating motorcycles moving in slow motion. Molly develops an intriguing friendship with the beautiful French-speaking Ngoc (Lang Khê Tran) in South Vietnam, and their traveling together begins as if it were the most natural thing in the world

The limitation, but also the beauty, of Gomes' method is that during the filmmaking process he alllowed the locations to determine where things would go as he went along, as Wes Anderson partly did when making The Darjeeling Limited (NYFF 2007) in India. But Gomes, unlike Wes, is traveling through numerous countries. And this is another beauty of the film, its languages, because it constantly shifts from its home tongue of Portuguese within a conversation or from scene to scene, to Thai, Vietnamese, French, Japanese, and Chinese. And the voiceover - and there always is one - in whatever country is spoken in the location language and is constantly shifting. Remember: "Let's get lost" is the organizing principle. All this is very similar to Gomes' 2012 Tabu, in whose second half the director also improvised as he changed from one exotic location to another. But the structure is stronger and the mood more unified here.

As was said in my Tabu review for the 2012 NYFF, Gomes' way of making exotic, romantic , retro fantasies can be a bit shallow, but nonetheless the result is "evocative and very cinematic." Lean back and enjoy the ride. This man is unique, and what he's going for is the world of your dreams.

Grand Tour, 128 mins., debuted at Cannes, receiving the Best Director award, and showing also at Sydney, Karlovy Vary, New Zealand, Toronto, Vancouver, and other international festivals, including the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 76%. (Now 79%/) A MUBI release.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.