Part of my coverage of the 60th Chicago International Film Festival
GRAND TOUR ***
Miguel Gomes2024
IDEA: After getting cold feet on his wedding day, an administrator for the British Crown in 1918 Rangoon flees across Southeast Asia, with his fiancée following behind.
BLURB: Revisiting the luscious black-and-white tropical aesthetic and postcolonial parable of his 2012 film Tabu, Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour tells an upended story of imperialist hegemony centering on the doomed romance of a pair of white colonizers. In any narrative about colonialism, there is the problem of the (usually Western) teller’s penchant for taking the point of view of the Westerner, but Gomes cleverly skirts this issue through a meta-fictional device: the story of Edward and Molly is narrated through a heteroglossic collection of Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese, and other voices of Southeast Asia. As a result, the couple’s story takes on the quality of a folktale, impish and sarcastic, analogous to the myriad puppet shows and shadow plays Grand Tour presents being performed in their native cultural contexts. Edward and Molly are strangers in a land where they don’t belong, and Gomes underscores the fact through the Golden Age Hollywood artifice of studio sets and gauzy light, not to mention the Portuguese he has them and all their fellow British colonizers inexplicably speak. Grand Tour contrasts their frustrated, mostly parallel peregrinations with gliding, oneiric documentary footage of the various countries and cities they visit; in these juxtapositions, it feels deliberately unclear what, or whom, it is that is foreign. If Gomes can’t entirely escape the touristic Western gaze, he’s also well aware of it, playfully teasing at its boundaries until a denouement breaks them all down in an ecstatically self-reflexive gesture of movie magic.
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