Grand Tour is a dreamlike fantasy from Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes

One of our greatest working filmmakers, Portugal’s Miguel Gomes, captures a sense of dreaming in his films. With his latest, Grand Tour, which won him the Best Director prize at the Cannes film festival, he tells an epic love story that spans the Asian continent. Blurring the line between eras, locales and documentary, he creates a hybrid account of an absurdist love story turned tragedy. The film begins in 1917, as British diplomat Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) gets cold feet for his upcoming marriage and undertakes a journey across Asia to escape his fiancé Molly (Crista Alfaiate). Shot (mostly) in black and white, like Gomes’s previous films Arabian Nights and Tabu, period locales are intermixed with contemporary documentary footage as a means of invoking a dreamlike impact. As if characters are self-aware of their own fictional framings, they too seem to drift in and out of sleeping, fevers and environments, stumbling out of time. 

While on one hand an incredibly straightforward love story, these interruptions and tangents contribute a sense of melancholic motif to Grand Tour that elevates it above a more conventional approach. With hints of Max Ophuls films, particularly La Ronde and Madame de…, the rhythm and patterns of going around in circles undercuts the love story of a couple who never share the screen. Footage of grandiose balls are contrasted against roundabouts in contemporary cityscapes; the circles of love and loss rebound through time and space. Featuring layers of narration, which are epistolary, confessional and intimate, the movie embraces humour as a means of creating an absurdist parable about desire. Laughter and music fill out the frame, creating an experience that overflows with pleasure. The embrace of artifice amidst so much nonfiction points to fiction’s capacity to unveil truths about our inner world, unavailable to the realm of documentary and reportage. It’s only through art that love can overcome death. ■

This review was originally published as part of our FNC 2024 coverage.

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